In part one of our Best Practices episode, we took a look at strategies for building strong partnerships and for a successful roll-out. In this final episode, we’re picking up where we left off. We explore San Francisco’s best practices in gaining trust with their outreach strategies; go in-depth with Seattle’s excellent education program; demonstrate the hands-on tracking system in Los Angeles; and discuss key policy measures that can impact a program’s success.

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This event will bring together leading practitioners, cutting-edge researchers, and Global South representatives of local farming and cooperatives of waste pickers to look into the climate solutions around organic waste, particularly exploring the intersection between zero waste and agroecology. In cities around the world, practice is showing that tackling organic waste is key; while being part of the problem, its proper management in composting can turn it into a real solution for soil depletion, emission reduction from landfills and use of chemical fertilizers.

Join the USCC at the world’s largest composting conference and exhibition for the organics management industry. Hear the latest from industry leaders about solving challenges in collecting organics, manufacturing and using compost, and producing renewable energy from organics. Visit their composting tradeshow to see the latest in equipment and tools for effective programs. of particular interest to listeners of this program will be the Session on Measuring Diversion Improvements from Enhanced Tenant Engagement at Multi-Family Dwellings, presented by Lily Kelly of Global Green.

CHAPTER 5: DOOR-TO-DOOR OUTREACH STRATEGIES AND LOBBY EVENTS

THE ORGANIC STREAM: We left off episode three discussing Milan’s outreach campaign as part of their roll-out strategy. One of the key ingredients of their campaign was meeting tenants face-to-face in the apartment buildings, or at community meetings. This is the cornerstone of any outreach campaign.

I want to look at this in a little more detail, because engaging tenants is not always as simple as just heading over to the building and knocking on the door. It’s about gaining trust.

In episode two, we discussed in detail the importance of understanding the demographics you’re working with – reaching people where they are – either online or offline, at community gatherings, social media spaces, television, on the street at local festivals, and so on. Also making sure to have native speakers of the different languages on staff is crucial. This can go a long way to getting people to engage and to trust you. But there is more to it than that. Program coordinators have a few extra tricks up their sleeves to get people in apartment buildings interested, engaged, and willing to attend meetings.

Remember Alexa Kielty, member of the residential zero waste team at the San Francisco Department of Environment?

Well, Alexa told me a lot about their outreach work, and I was really impressed. We covered San Francisco in great detail in episode one and two, and as we know their zero waste strategy is one of the most impressive zero waste initiatives. In terms of organics recycling in multi story buildings – all residential buildings with less than six units separate their organics, and eighty percent of large-scale residential buildings do the same. Right now, San Francisco is focusing on the remaining twenty percent to close the gap, and because of this they have started to really hone-in their outreach strategy.

Alexa told me that in San Francisco, staff work directly with building managers to create individualised outreach program for the building – again, this means working with different demographics, customising the outreach materials, and so on. They also go door-to-door to deliver kitchen caddies and outreach materials year in, year out. Because of this, they have some great experience in knowing what to do to gain people’s trust and make it work…

ALEXA KEITLY: After we set up the programs, we have a whole outreach team called Environment Now, which is a green careers program – so, somewhat of a job training program. We hire from the community so we get a lot of native Spanish speakers, native Chinese speakers; we have a native Russian speaker and a native Filipino speaker on staff. And those folks will do what we call a Green Apartments, which is essentially door-to-door outreach within apartment buildings, at about five to seven pm in the evening, so hopefully we’re getting people when they’re coming back from work. And we work with the property manager so the tenants know ahead of time that we’ll be there on the certain days; we find out what languages are needed; we send outreach materials to property managers to post within the building ahead of time and in the elevator, so it’s not a surprise visit.

What’s great is if the property manager can come with us when we do outreach, or the resident manager, which is even better because they typically know more tenants. If that person can actually conduct the door-to-door outreach with us that’s really helpful because more people are willing to open their doors if there’s somebody they know.

TOS: This is great information here. First off, it seems the most important thing is to make the outreach personal. Alexa says they hire people from within the community they’re reaching out to – people who understand the community and are native speakers of the language of that community. It’s easier to open your door to people familiar to you.

Another thing they do is work with the building manager to give people notice that they’ll be coming, of course.

And finally, and most importantly, the trick to getting people to open their doors is to have a building or resident manager come with them. When we spoke to Lily Kelly of Global Green in her office in San Francisco, she said a similar thing…

LILLY KELLY: Having a tenant or a property manager come with us when we were doing the door-to-door outreach initially, especially if it’s a tenant who knows other people in the building, I think we got a lot more people answering their doors because it was their neighbour who’s knocking and saying, “Hey I want to introduce you to this person who’s doing this composting project, we’re going to have this at our building and it’s going to be really great”. I think that really changed people’s perspectives on it right at the outset of, “Oh, this is something my neighbours are interested in.

TOS: Gaining trust is a big part of getting people involved and interested in the program. So if tenants can see there’s someone from their building that’s interested, they might be more inclined to listen.

Now, in a big city, with a lot of buildings it’s not always easy to manage or finance such initiatives – which is why it’s a good idea to find recycling champions in the building – either a tenant or building manager and support them in promoting the program. Seattle has a great volunteer program for building managers that does exactly that, the Friends of Recycling and Composting program – and I’ll get into it later in the episode.

Another great tactic is to work with people that have some social significance – popular figures within the community, or local celebrities. This can really boost a program’s image and make it more attractive.

So that’s door-to-door outreach. Now let’s look at open events, or what are often called lobby events.

Setting up an event in the building, where people can come along to get information and perhaps pick up equipment is a common strategy. Many programs do this, and it can work quite well. But to get people to take time out of their day to attend, that requires some strategic thinking.

There are two main tricks you can use that have been shown to give results. And to learn about them, I wanted to take a trip back down memory lane, to one of the first interviews I ever did here on The Organic Stream.

(Clip of old episode plays).

TOS: This is our second episode, when I interviewed Rokiah Yaman and Clare Brass, director of the SEED Foundation, about her food scrap recycling research program that aimed to discover the barriers to organics recycling in urban environments. Clare was working with an inner-city estate, the Maiden Lane estates, in a disadvantaged area in London. And she told me about her difficulties in engaging the residents, who had much more immediate problems to deal with.

But using some clever techniques, she was able to overcome these challenges and get people participating in the program anyway.

CLARE BRASS: Recruitment is still the most difficult thing with these projects and you need to get under the skin of the people, your primary stakeholders. Now, often the thing that is driving you, so in our case the environmental challenge of food waste, is not the thing at all which is maybe driving a resident of a housing estate.

The thing that works quite well, and I think this is a really good trick, is that we piggybacked on an event that was happening at the estate. Just when we started the project there was a barbeque event coming up on the estate. We went along to that event, and we set up a stall with a poster. All we did really was go along with a whole stall full of little tomato plants, a bucket of food waste and a bucket of compost, and just talked to people and say “did you know that your food waste can look like this one day, and then it turns into this?” And most people were quite surprised, but it was an opportunity for us to start a conversation with them.

And I think the key thing here is, if you’re recruiting, it’s to go to where people are already going to be going, and just give them a little, a little tiny reward. Just to have a first point of contact. After that we managed to get about 15 to come to our first workshop. So that was a really good way in.

TOS: So there we have two of the best strategies for getting people to attend – using existing meetings or events at a building for your own outreach event, and make sure to have rewards. Other programs, such as Seattle, often advertise their educational presentation sessions in buildings as the place where people can collect their free containers. Another really great idea is to provide refreshments, because as program managers have told me – people tend to come if there’s food. So these strategies work really well.

TOS: One of the most important goals of an organics recycling program is to change behaviour and to get people to understand the impact their actions will have. Without this, there is no will to carry out the action. And this is where education comes in.

We touched on education before in episode two – focusing strongly on the importance of multi-language education materials.

Today, we go further and focus on the excellent education strategy that Marcia Rutan, Recycling Program Manager at Seattle Public Utilities, employs for their organics program.

TOS: Marcia Rutan has been working in education for a long time and she’s been greatly supported in her work thanks to Seattle’s progressive recycling laws. We learned quite a bit about Seattle’s organics program in the last episode. In 2011 it became mandatory to provide organic carts in multistory buildings, and implemented a full composting mandate for the whole city in January this year. Fines for too much food waste in garbage containers will start to be issued in January 2016.

From researching their program, I was inspired by the work they do to educating people. When I got Marcia on the phone, I wanted her to tell me all about it. And the first thing I asked was to start from the beginning: just what were the basic building blocks of their educational program?

MARCIA RUTAN: In terms of education, what we find across the board is that property managers especially appreciate posters that can be placed above the carts. Then we also have labels for the carts, and all of these have pictures as well as wording. And then we have our basic flyers. We use two basic flyers for this program. One is called the Where Does It Go flyer, and it has colour coding for all three waste streams: the recycling, which is blue, the compostables, which are green, and the garbage, which is a grey/black colour. The other flyer then is basically a food plus compostables guideline, which is all green, and it’s just to make it clearer to people what goes into the compost cart since it’s a new program. The flyer also provides a few “why is this important” points, as well as tips for storing and carrying out materials – so it just gives some more information. Those are the two basic flyers that we use with this program.

These are foundational for the property managers. They really rely on those flyers, the labels, the posters and the carts – and they’re all colour coded. And that partly came from…in about 2007 or 2008, we held focus groups with community based organisations. They were primarily constituted of folks who were immigrants or who have English as another language (I won’t say second language, because we know some of these folks have several languages under their belts). But they said they wanted the colour coding, and they didn’t want a “yes” “no” type of poster, which was confusing to them, but just “where do things go” in all categories. So that’s where these informational flyers came out of, and the colour coding.

TOS: So flyers, labels and posters are foundational elements for property managers in Seattle. Using focus groups to understand what residents would prefer gave them a better idea of how to design their materials. Colour coding is a crucial element – many cities agree that this is key. It’s easy to understand and transcends any language barriers as well. Another important element that also overcomes language barriers, and for those with reading difficulties, is pictures. And it was Alexa that said to me at one point during our interview that a lot of people, no matter what language they speak, tend not to read the posters – so pictures can really help.

One important thing here I want to bring up is the design of the materials. We often see too many design mistakes – so materials are either overcrowded with information and pictures, the signage is unclear or hard to follow, colours and contrast is also something to take into account as well, because if there is too much going on, or it’s just plain black and white, people won’t want to look at it. The more well-designed, clear and pleasant to look at the materials are, the better it will be.

So – educational tools such as flyers, hand-outs and stickers can be classed as passive education tools. Other very popular passive education tools are promotional tools like door hangers or magnets, and of course websites, apps, and social media.

Now, Marcia mentioned websites and social media as tools they like to use for education and outreach – and this was the same for all the cities we interviewed. In this day and age, when so many of us rely on smartphones and the internet as a primary source of information, having an online presence can make a big difference. The benefits are great. They allow program managers to interact directly with residents, share information quickly and easily, and to answer questions.

There are an increasing amount of platforms online to use to get the message out. The key here is to choose the right platform for your target group – for example, younger generations don’t tend to use Facebook as much as they use Snapchat or Instagram. The DSNY in New York have currently started an Instagram account, to try and reach the younger audience – they also have twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr accounts. So there are a growing number of platforms, and when designing your outreach strategy, it is your responsibility to adapt your strategy.

So these are great passive tools to use in an educational campaign. But what about the more hands-on approach we discussed before?

What interested me greatly in Seattle city as a case study and Marcia’s approach was her use of a more active educational approach. At many of the properties, Marcia conducts one-to-one on-site presentations that seem to go down very well with the residents.

MR: And we use that Where Does It Go flyer and we take props with us so people get a hands-on experience with putting things into the right colour bin. So I take two big bags of stuff, I distribute it to folks, teach them how to use the flyer, and then they come and put it into the bin they think it goes in and we discuss it. And this is a very popular game, people really love it. I’m a real believer in multiple educational intelligences: rather than just looking at a printed form, that people get their hands on things, and are kinaesthetic as well – they like to get up and move. So I think all of those are really important.

TOS: This idea of providing a mix of different educational methods to help reach people is an interesting one. And practicing the physical act of putting organics in the right bin can definitely help make the lesson to stick in a person’s mind.

With on-site presentations like these, it’s easy to see how they can help build a positive relationship between tenants and the program. It also gives educators a chance to get feedback directly from people, address questions and so on.

Seattle has 5 thousand multistory properties…and half of the population of the city lives in mulitstory buildings. That is a lot of people to reach out to. I asked Marcia if they had the budget to be able to reach everyone this way, and she said no. But what they do have is the volunteer program that I mentioned before…

MR: We run a train the trainer program called Friends of Recycling and Composting, where property managers or their designanted representatives come and take a two-hour training to get motivated and educated on where does stuff go and best practices at the property, as well as how to motivate residents. And people provide really high marks on this training program. They say they basically came just to get the free buckets (which we use as a hook to get them there!), but they left actually profoundly motivated to back and work with their residents, so it’s been really effective.

TOS: While it’s important to educate tenants, many reports show that the most effective education is focused on property managers. This is why the Friends of Recycling and Composting Program is such a great tool.

But educating building managers and owners is not without challenges.

MR: There is quite a bit of turnover of property managers, so we’ll just get them educated and inspired, and then they’ll move on to another property…which sometimes can work in our favour, because then they go on to help that other property get going. But sometimes we just basically lose them. And then there’s also resistance by some property managers: they hide the cart, they don’t want the residents to use it because they don’t want to deal with the ick factor, or they perceive a mess is going to happen. So we have missing carts.

We don’t have a good way to deal with the turnover – we just train, train, train and then like I said, some go on to other properties and help out those other properties to get going. But in terms of resistance – the drivers do report missing carts and we can just sort those and find out what are the larger properties (because those are the ones we go after). And then we target them. We give them a call, we go on site and find out what the barrier is for them to participate. Then we work with them, trouble shoot and provide education – anything we can to help feel more confident to get going. And often it’s that they’re very busy, so it can be a time issue. Another issue is fear, and we just try to deal with those fears. So a lot of those have gotten up and going.

TOS: One thing about education is that it’s always on-going. There is no real end to the work that needs to be done. Especially for a city like Seattle – with a program that’s very comprehensive and can still cause confusion over what goes where. We gained a lot of insight into what tools work best for educating both tenants and property managers. But the most inspiring thing to take away from the Seattle case study is their commitment to constantly refining their strategy year after year to help clear up this confusion.

MR: We continually listen to our customers. We do have a wonderful “look it up” tool on our website, which is one of the most used links on our website, where hundreds of items are listed and the best disposal practices are provided for, and it’s just so many different materials. So that’s been a big help. And we are also continually listening when people give us feedback about what isn’t working with the flyers, or what might need revision, so each year when we go to revise the flyer, we try to make it more clear and useful for people. You know, it’s not always going to meet everybody’s personal style of education, but we just do our best. We really try to listen to the customer, rather than thinking we’re the experts. We are experts, but we also know that it’s incredibly important to listen to the customer. We learned a lot through the community-based social marketing, we really do employ those principles as much as we can. And so listening to our customers is very key.

JS: So we have two compost bags in here, and…we do have one aluminium can.

TOS: Here, we’re following them as they conduct their monthly inspections of the trash rooms on every floor of the Old Bank District Building.

JS: We do monthly site visits here to check each floor, and we mark down the odour level, the cleanliness level, contamination level, participation, and what the bag count looks like in the dispenser system.

TOS: Tracking results. This is one of the most valuable tools to have in an organics recycling program – especially a pilot program. The types of information to track can be materials collected, contamination rate, challenges faced, key contacts, and the amount of outreach employed. Compiling a detailed history of all these factors will be invaluable in moving forward, and to give accurate information when presenting program results.

In LA, we were impressed by the strength of their tracking system and their hands-on approach.

JS: So what we’ve seen so far with this program is a high level of participation and a low contamination rate. To this date we’ve done three site visits, and on each of those three site visits we have one or two standard traditional poly bags in the compost bin, and that’s it.

TOS: As you can see, by tracking results in person, Jason and Jessica have a much clearer understanding of how successful their program is. By visiting the building in person, they have a chance to spot problem areas and recognise trends in the buildings.

Of course, one of the most important things to track is the contamination rate. Keeping an eye on how contaminated the stream is, and being able to react quickly to any issues is useful – especially for the processor who will be dealing with the materials on the back end.

JESSICA ALDRIDGE: From the hauler and the collector and processer’s standpoint, we have to make sure that the material we’re collecting is good material. And I would say one of the hardest programs to enact is a multi-family separation program, especially for organics. So through this process we want to keep a very watchful eye on that product to make sure it’s as clean as possible. Because if we’re processing this material and it’s making its way back to our sort line – so, when it comes back to materials recovery facility, we have a sort line that it goes up to and the material that’s not supposed to be in there is pulled off. Then it is shipped off to our compost facility in Victorville, it is screened once again, then it is composted and that compost is then screened once again.

So we want to make sure that we have as little an amount of contaminants as possible, or else we end up with a more strenuous process. And also, it gives us an idea of if we need to send out more education and outreach to the residents here, to the management or to the maintenance – whatever it may be. So that also directs how we’re going to move forward with the program.

TOS: So, tracking is not only is useful to help you to understand and optimise your program, but it can also help shape your program as well. Frequent site visits are an excellent way to keep a close eye on what’s going on and allow you to quickly react to any problems that come up. This is extremely valuable – especially for pilot programs that are looking to expand in the future.

CHAPTER 8: HOW POLICY CAN SHAPE YOUR ORGANICS RECYCLING PROGRAM

TOS: Every organics program is shaped by the regulatory structure it exists within. It can be supported by this structure, or it can be hindered by it. Throughout the show, we’ve come across examples of how policy has impacted on the programs we’ve covered. And it is no coincidence that the cities we chose for our case studies have some of the most progressive laws and policies in place today.

Places that put in place ambitious recycling targets, landfill or incineration diversion goals, or bans on organics going to landfills or incinerators as part of a sustainable waste management strategy are really important. They can create the necessary leverage needed to push for organics recycling. When supported and enforced properly, they can be a critical driver for collection programs. Every city we spoke to has a zero waste vision, or a zero waste commitment, with ambitious recycling targets. Most notably San Francisco – which leads the way in terms of ambitious policy – with just five years to reach zero waste in 2020.

Financial tools used by policy makers to promote organics recycling are important. Pay-as-you-throw systems for waste have been shown to greatly increase participation in recycling schemes in municipalities all around the world. And it makes sense: If buildings are charged more for waste collection than food scrap collection, it gives managers direct financial incentive to participate in the program.

ENZO FAVOINO: Bring systems never work as effectively as kerbside systems do. The true springboard towards zero waste has always been the implementation of a kerbside scheme targeting also the organics. With such a system, you quite easily jump up to seventy or eighty percent separate collection. Then, after that, in order to move further towards one hundred percent, what we do next is the implementation of a pay-as-you-throw scheme. And this increases separate collection by a further ten percent, but also it remarkably decreases the overall waste arisings.

TOS: But in a city where buildings are serviced by private haulers, municipalities can’t always control the price of collection. In some cases, where landfills are publicly owned, they can control how expensive it is to send the waste to these public facilities. Municipalities may also be able to raise tipping fees for garbage, and tax rates for landfilling or incineration, so that recycling once again becomes the more desirable option. This in turn will mean buildings are charged more for garbage collection and give them a reason to start composting!

There are also policy measures that indirectly impact on programs – which we saw in the case of Milan with the ban on chutes and the plastic bag ban that led to biobags becoming more available.

But perhaps what had the greatest impact on the cities we covered are mandates that require composting, or that organics stay out of waste bins.

MARCIA RUTAN: Basically we mentioned the two policies that have been the most critical: one requiring properties to subscribe, which was September 2011 – and that definitely had some impact but it had no enforcement quality to it, so it was not as strong as the new law which started this January that says no food waste in the garbage. And with that associated fine, that has had a very big impact on the properties wanting to participate.

LILY KELLY: When there’s an ordinance, or when there’s a law that requires composting, it really makes a difference. Just listening to the property managers changing their narrative it from, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to compost, it seems gross and smelly,” to, “How do we make this work?”

TOS: While it’s not a fix-all solution, the financial incentives that come with mandatory measures can make a huge difference – nobody wants to pay a penalty for not recycling properly. In multistory buildings, fines that are shared equally among tenants can help combat the anonymity factor. Enforcing these fines work best with a kerbside system.

Those are some of the key policy measures we’ve come across in the cities we’ve covered that have had a direct positive impact on programs. Having a strong policy framework will help steer everyone in the right direction, but it also has another great effect. It leaves program coordinators free to concentrate on doing their job, as opposed to spending their time fighting to change things for the better:

MARCIA RUTAN: Seattle is just a really leading-edge city in this. The agency I worked at previously had a pretty good program, but I always felt like in some ways I had to fight for recycling and composting to continue. Whereas when I’m working with Seattle, I basically feel like I’m swimming as fast as I can to catch up. And it’s wonderful! I can go as fast as I can to do as much as possible and there’s still room for opportunity. It’s really great!

FINAL CONCLUSION

So we’ve come to the end of our show, and it’s been a great journey. We’ve covered a lot of ground on this topic and there is a lot to take in.

But what we’ve seen through this show is that while multi-residential organics programs have their challenges, it is very possible to roll out a well-running, successful scheme.

The success of the programs we covered is a result of careful planning of the system, building strong relationships with key partners, working with building managers to find solutions, spending time with focus-groups to craft a successful outreach campaign, investing in communication, and taking a step-by-step approach to implementation.

They each use a combination of different strategies – all tailored to suit the needs of the specific building, or area, that they’re targeting. Your program’s success is predicated on your ability to execute consistently all the strategies we discussed, and to continually measure and improve your approach as you go along.

And in the case of Milan especially, we can see that with the right system and approach, and a supportive policy to back it up, organics recycling programs in multi-residental buildings can be rolled out with no more difficulty than any other organic recycling scheme.

So while multi story residential buildings can be a challenge for many cities, combining the wealth of experiences and best practices from the leading cities, we have a great roadmap to guide us on our journey.

On our journey through the planning stages of multi-residential organics programs, we’ve come across many challenges. But as more and more cities start tackling food waste in their apartment buildings, we’re creating a whole library of experiences, best practices, and successful strategies to learn from. In Episode 3, we begin to take a closer look at the cities leading the way (focusing on Milan and Los Angeles), and explore the key strategies they use that makes them so successful.

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INTRODUCTION

THE ORGANIC STREAM: On our journey through the planning stages of multi-residential organics programs, we’ve come across many challenges. Some easy to deal with, others still difficult to solve – like the problem with chutes in San Francisco.

It’s clear that just like buildings, no two cities are alike – each have their own history, culture, unique demographics and structure – And all of this will impact how an organics recycling system should be designed. But what connects all the cities we’ve talked to is their determination to succeed, their skill in navigating problems, and their drive to improve.

And as more and more cities like these start tackling food waste in their apartment buildings, we’re creating a whole library of experiences, best practices, and successful strategies to learn from.

In the final two episodes, we take a closer look the cities leading the way – and explore just what are the key strategies they use that makes them so successful.

Let’s jump right in!

CHAPTER 1: PILOTING AND PARTNERSHIPS – LOS ANGELES CASE STUDY

TOS: On this show, we’ve talked a lot about building relationships. With tenants, with building managers…and we’re going to kick-start this episode by exploring another essential relationship for any organics program to work: the relationship between the key partners.

Because without communication and collaboration between program coordinators, haulers and processors, outreach teams and building managers too, collecting and recycling organics would become an impossible task. It really takes a team effort to make it work.

And over the course of producing this show, there was one program that really stood out to us showed…us just how beneficial this team building is.

I’m taking us back to Los Angeles.

JESSICA ALDRIDGE: Hi, my name is Jessica Aldridge, I’m the sustainability manager for Athens Services, I’ve been there for three years.

TOS: Here we are, standing outside the Old Bank District multistory building with Jason Sanders and Jessica Aldridge as we get ready to take a tour and learn all about their pilot program.

JESSICA ALDRIDGE: And so I and my crew at Athens wanted to do something ahead of time to figure out how this was going to work. What things are going to work well, what road bumps are we going to come up against. We wanted to try to pick apartment complexes with varying demographics and situations with how their waste is collected, and set up different types of infrastructure to see what works best, and what type of outreach works best. Because what works here may not work for somewhere else. And so in 2017, when the franchise agreement comes into play in the city of Los Angeles, we will already have the experience and the resources available to us to say “now we know”, when I have ten apartment complexes coming to me wanting to do this, I and my crew, and the staff at Athens are not going to feel overwhelmed and say “I’ve never done this before”.

TOS: So Jessica gives us an insight into their thinking in starting up the program. From here, Jessica and her team started looking for the right partners to work with – and those partners were Global Green USA and EcoSafe ZeroWaste.

Together they make an effective team – Jason and Jessica work closely together, visiting the properties every month and address any issues together. And it is clear that all three partners share the same goal for the program.

JASON SANDERS: Well it’s just really important for all partners to have a good understanding of what’s working and what’s not before a mass roll-out. So we’ve really got to dial in the success factors and those factors that aren’t working, and be able to address those. And that’s really what this pilot program is doing right now.

JESSICA ALDRIDGE: We work with the apartment managers, we tell them exactly what’s going to be happening. And then from there you have to get the buy-in from the managers as well, that this is something that they want to take on, and knowing that this most likely be a long-term pilot until we can get the right feet underneath it. And we knew from the beginning – we never thought we were going to kick this thing off and it was going to be perfect from the beginning. I don’t want it to be perfect. Well, I want it to be perfect in the end, but I don’t want it to be perfect in the beginning, because if it is you learn very little to be able to move forward and create these types of programs more so down the road.

TOS: So the pilot acts as a learning experience for all partners – instead of looking for perfection, you’re looking for the challenges. This is how a program grows strong. And overcoming those challenges can only happen when all partners understand and share this same purpose.

When we sat down to chat in the café on the first floor of the Old Bank District Building, we took the time to ask about their partnership, and what they considered important when selecting partners and building a strong program.

JASON SANDERS: Three crucial partners are always needed: hauler and processer being one, building manager is number two, and then we have us as a partner that has the tools for the program. And if you have communication outreach partner as well that always comes in handy, and in this case Global Green was that partner. And those partnerships have to be valued from the very beginning of designing the program, to the program launch, to long-term viability of the program. So those partners are together through that entire process.

TOS: So for a program to work, all key partners need to stick together from the very beginning, and all through the process. If there is a lack of communication or a lack of support from any of these partners, the program will suffer. As we saw in LA, all three key partners of the pilot program can keep communication channels open, learn from each other’s experiences and build a strong foundation for the future when the program expands.

CHAPTER 2: SUCCESSFUL ROLL-OUT STRATEGIES – MILAN CASE STUDY

TOS: Milan – a city of 1.4 million people at the northern Lombardy region of Italy. Milan began roll-out of its city-wide organics recycling system in November 2012 and is currently the largest city in the world running a formal separate collection scheme for organic materials. It’s also the city with the highest capture rates in Europe: with an average of 95 kg, or just over 200 pounds, of food waste being collected per inhabitant a year.

On top of this, almost 90 percent of the population in Milan lives in multistory residences – and still the contamination rate stays below 5 percent.

So how does the system operate?

In multistory buildings, it’s quite standardised: tenants collect their food scraps in kitchen caddies, and bring these down to the common waste room to throw into wheelie bins. Even tenants living in very high buildings, like skyscrapers, are expected to bring their scraps to the waste rooms on the ground floor – since there are no chutes in the city.

Then, the bins are brought to the curb on certain days for pickup. It’s important to note here that Milan operates a kerbside collection scheme, or door-to-door collection scheme. This is the system used in all the cities we’ve talked to – and for good reason.

By collecting from each household or building, haulers and program coordinators can track who is participating and who isn’t. They can more easily reward those who are doing it right, and can target those who are doing it wrong. In Milan, this means a fine for contamination – and for multistory buildings, the fine is shared among tenants – giving them a reason to recycle properly. And, by performing well, neighbourhoods can also compete for prize money for local schools – as a sort of reward.

Let’s compare this with the more traditional bring system – where people put their organics in a roadside container or fixed spot outside their building. There is no control over how well sorted the materials are. Because it’s impossible to know who puts what inside, it means people can contaminate the stream without fear of consequences. For example, the bring system for organics in Barcelona, Spain, experiences a contamination rate between 15 to 30 percent – much higher than Milan. Because of this anonymity, cities lose the ability to target offenders, and also to reward those who do well.

So while kerbside collection systems are relatively new to cities, they are proving to be a great way to ensure success for organics recycling programs.

And this is the case in Milan. The scheme is also known for being quite popular with residents, and this popularity is the result of a very smooth and well-coordinated roll-out strategy.

But how did a city with so many multistory residential buildings manage to roll-out so smoothly?

ENZO FAVOINO: We did a customer satisfaction analysis last year, and we came up with very intriguing results…

TOS: This is Enzo Faviono – researcher and advisor at the Scuola Agraria del Parco di Monza in Italy, coordinator of the Working Group on Composting and Sustainable Waste Management.

EF: Seventy nine percent of the population declared support of the system, with a critical area of those showing to be unhappy only totalling seven percent of the population.

TOS: Enzo and his team played an instrumental role in helping the city of Milan implement their organics recycling scheme. During our call in the summer, I asked Enzo to tell us all about their strategy, and the critical factors for their success…

EF: So we did a couple of campaigns in order to test the contamination rate, and the outcomes were very, very satisfactory because we found more than ninety five percent purity of collected food waste, which puts Milan in line with the outcomes of the border municipalities. So, it’s not a matter of a densely populated area relative to a small village; it’s a matter for the type of the scheme.

TOS: I wanted to start with this clip, because it straightaway hones-in on the key element for success. Milan is a big and very dense city. But even with these challenges and with so many high rises, Milan was able to match the border municipalities’ low contamination rates and keep the system running smoothly.

Enzo is saying that size does not matter, but the type of scheme does. So what type of scheme do we need to be successful?

EF: If it generates comfortability for the people they will participate, and they will adopt the proper care for the system to be run. We tend to believe that we can’t ask people to provide excess effort. We don’t want it to be made painful for them to participate in separate collection, so it has to be made as user friendly as possible.

TOS: This brings us back to that old mantra: Convenience is king. So what was it that Milan did to make their scheme as convenient as possible for residents?

EF: First of all, let me mention that Milan was divided into four quarters, each of which totalled a population of three hundred and fifty thousand people. So the scheme was implemented by steps. The first step covering the first quarter of three hundred and fifty thousand people in November 2012, then the second in June 2013, the third quarter in December 2013, and the fourth in June 2014. So in slightly more than one and a half years we could cover one hundred percent of the population.

Whenever we implemented the system in a new area, we gave a starter kit to the households which included the kitchen caddies, to have a good, clean management of the organics in the kitchen, and a starting role of fifty biobags. Fifty biobags may cover the needs for half a year. In Milan we have two collection rounds per week, so we would normally need one hundred bags a year per household. But we gave them only fifty for the first six months, because now the system in Italy is fundamentally supported by the fact that Italy was the first country in Europe to adopt a full ban on polyethylene shopping bags. So now in all the supermarkets you can get a shopping bag that is biodegradable, so you can use it once as a shopping bag, and a second time as a lining for the kitchen caddie during the collection of biowaste.

TOS: Enzo gives us a few points here to think about. The polyethylene shopping bag ban in Milan increased the level of convenience for tenants, Enzo tells us. We know from episode two the problems that New York are facing – when people can’t afford or find biobags, they can end up using polyethylene plastic bags instead.

Another point of interest is the delivery of biobags and kitchen caddies before roll-out. This is very convenient for tenants first of all, but both biobags and kitchen caddies are also great tools to tackle the infamous “yuck” factor – which can often make people squeamish about an organics program. Using these tools, Enzo reported that the “yuck” factor was not much of an issue for residents.

EF: Yuck was not a main issue for disappointment. That’s basically because the use of the biobags is incredibly helpful in this respect. We also used vented kitchen caddies, because by using the transferability of the biobags and the vents in the kitchen caddies, we tend to lose up to twenty percent of the whole weight of food waste in terms of water vapour. So we tend to have only small amounts, if any, of leakage at the bottom of the biobags. But in any case, it’s fully kept by the biobags, so this keeps the system tidy.

TOS: Now, we can’t finish talking about convenience factors in Milan without mentioning one of the biggest contributors. The closing of chutes by the city. In episode one we dived into the problem with chutes, and how they impact programs like San Francisco’s and New York’s…

EF: We used to have the chutes in the past. Of course the chutes would kill any effort on separate collection, because the take responsibility away from the households, unfortunately. Now, no new building may have any chutes, and they were fully closed in the old buildings.

TOS: Enzo’s words really drive-home how big an impact chutes can have – it can kill an organics collection program. Inadvertently, Milan’s health and safety policy had a positive knock-on effect for their organics system. While San Francisco is currently trying to support building owners in closing their chutes, they face a certain level of resistance from the tenants board . Closing chutes can be a politically challenging, but nevertheless, it has to be said that policies like Milan’s can really help to level the playing field.

CHAPTER 3: COLLECTING ORGANICS – FREQUENCY AND WHAT TO COLLECT

TOS: Now, Enzo had some interesting things to say about what goes on in the back end as well. How the material is collected can have an impact on convenience for residents. In general, weekly collections of organics are recommended. According to a 2009 Organics Working Group report, published by the Recycling Council of British Colombia, the Canadian city of Ottawa conducted of collection frequencies of organics programs across North America. And it was found that those that have a bi-weekly garbage collection and weekly organics collection have a significantly higher diversion rate than those that collect organics bi-weekly instead. The frequency will of course depend on climate and time of year as well. In some places, like Milan, it’s better to collect food scraps twice a week to keep it convenient for residents. But collections can be expensive, and for this reason it can sometimes be a challenge to collect so frequently. And Enzo gave some great information on how Milan, and many other cities, tackle this issue.

EF: We consider what is the operational tradition, which has by now been consolidated in Italy and other European countries, which considers the different nature of the two main types of organics: food waste and garden waste. It’s worth considering collecting them separately, because on the one hand with food waste, we have a material that shows high fermentability and therefore needs to be collected quite frequently, but it’s also very heavy. Therefore it makes little if any sense to use a packer truck. On the other hand, we have got a material which is very bulky, such as garden waste, and therefore we should be using a compactor in order to collect garden waste at the kerb. But it is much less fermentable than food waste, so it doesn’t make much sense to collect them together.

One of the critical operational points for cost optimisation of the system is the use of dedicated trucks to collect food waste. It makes little if any sense to use the compactors to collect food waste. The compactor is one of the traditional trucks, as long as you collect mixed garbage, because mixed garbage tends to have a much lower bulk density than food waste itself. So one of the key issues is to consider a different composition of the fleet of vehicles. And in this respect we know that in many cities in past years, the investment costs were only focused on the purchase of big packer trucks. So, my recommendation would be to please start considering changing the composition of your fleet at the next procuring procedure for your fleet. That’s the most important thing.

CHAPTER 4: COMMUNICATION STRATEGY IN MILAN

TOS: So we’ve gained a lot of insight into best practices for roll-out from Milan. But we’re not finished yet.

The next important part of the roll-out strategy is communication of the program.

People need to be prepared for the changes to come. They need to understand why the changes are happening, when they will come into force, and how exactly the scheme will run.

In Milan, it’s thought that communication works best roughly two months in advance – just enough time for tenants to get familiar with it.

They began their campaign with street advertising, mailing brochures, launching a website and a free app as well – both of which allowed people to learn more and ask questions about the scheme.

Door-to-door delivery of the starter kits began 10 weeks before roll-out. This delivery process gave the outreach team an excellent chance to reach residents one-on-one to discuss the changes in person, addressing any concerns straight away. In a multistory building, where it’s often hard to reach people, this is a really effective strategy.

And it worked – roll-out was quite smooth and the residents behaved correctly straight away. This is one of the most important points to take away from the Milan study – if implemented correctly, you can achieve high participation rates right from the beginning. The trick, it seems, is to maintain that high rate.

Now, I know we played this in episode two, but for the final part of this case study, I’d like to take a listen once more to Enzo emphasising this point because it’s so important:

EF: One thing I would like to stress is that it may seem a paradox, but normally we tend to have the best results the very first week we start the system. You know, it’s what we call the “shocking effect”: we literally flood them with information and awareness campaigns. So the very first week we have always got the best results, which goes against the so-called received wisdom, because normally they tell us it will take ages to have people educated. No! They because right away.

Then, we have to keep the good level of results, because if you don’t provide the feedback to people telling them the way it is working, what the critical issues are, how to improve, and so on, then there will be some relaxation from the commitment. But if they get targeted every so often with messages saying “Hey you’re doing well, and we have saved such an amount of money” and so on and so forth, this helps keep the good levels both from the quantitative and qualitative angle.

CONCLUSION

TOS: Throughout this series we’ve often defined multistory buildings as the final frontier of organics recycling. But Milan demonstrates that this is not always the case.

In Milan, the program ran smoothly right from the beginning. “People behave right away”.

Why do they behave right away, when in other cases it’s not so easy?

Perhaps it’s because it was a city-wide roll-out – backed by a system of fines and rewards to encourage people to comply. In the piloting stage it’s much more difficult because people aren’t compelled to behave.

And as we’ve seen, both San Francisco and Seattle are finding it much easier to get people to comply thanks to their government’s mandatory policies.

But we also cannot forget the impact that both the chute ban and the polyethylene plastic bag ban had in Milan. This made participation more convenient and helped reduce contamination in the stream.

But is that all there is to it? Is there not also a cultural component to this question? Perhaps programs in America are considered harder to enact compared to somewhere like Milan because where the culture and history is quite different. It has been said that the mood was right for citizens in Milan to change, since the garbage crisis of the 90s – when trash was piled on the streets – was still in people’s memory.

These are interesting questions we’re asking ourselves right now. We’re compiling all these thoughts and we may come back with a follow-up episode in the future.

This week we’re in New South Wales, Australia, to learn about the Waste Less Recycle More initiative and the Organics Infrastructure Fund that will see 70 million AUD invested into organics management in the region. We speak with the Director of Waste and Resource Recovery at the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA), Steve Beaman, to learn more about this initiative and their plans to pull more organics out of landfills, and discuss the importance of government support and strong policy for success.

We also speak with Robert Niccol of landscape and agricultural supply company Australian Native Landscapes, to get an insight into the processor’s perspective, the challenges that the industry anticipates with this increase in supply, and to discuss further the EPA’s plans to work with industry in developing new markets with their Organics Market Development grants.

The NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) is the primary environmental regulator for New South Wales. Our purpose is to improve environmental performance and waste management for NSW.

The EPA’s Waste Less, Recycle More is a five year, $465.7 million initiative that’s transforming waste management in NSW. It includes funding for organics collections, processing infrastructure and market development, business recycling, drop off centres for problem wastes and programs to tackle litter and illegal dumping.

TRANSFORMING ORGANICS RECYCLING LANDSCAPE

THE ORGANIC STREAM: We often talk on the organic stream about the importance of policy and government support for making a real impact with our sustainability programs, and the NSW government provides a great example of this – with a strong policy direction stemming from the objectives set out in their waste legislation, the EPA and the NSW government have initiated a host of strategies and programs to reduce waste and keep materials circulating within the economy.

In particular, a 5-year initiative that invests just over 465 million Australian dollars into increasing recycling and keeping materials out of landfill – an unprecedented amount of funding that’s pulled directly from the region’s waste levy. The Waste Less Recycle More initiative has a heavy focus on organics recycling in particular with the Organics Infrastructure Fund. To learn more about this program and the importance of a comprehensive and cohesive policy for success, we gave a call to Steve Beaman, Director of Waste and Resource Recovery at the New South Wales Environment Protection Authority (EPA).

And with a goal of diverting organics from landscape, this will of course mean an increase in organics supply at organic recycling facilities around the region. How will this impact the industry? Well after speaking with Steve we reached out to Robert Niccol of Australian Native Landscapes, or ANL, to get an insight into the processor’s perspective and discuss further the EPA’s plans to work with industry to develop new markets.

Pretty exciting episode – so let’s jump right in with Steve Beaman of the EPA…

INTERVIEW WITH STEVE BEAMAN (EPA)

TOS: So Steve, a lot is happening in New South Wales at the moment – can you fill us in?

STEVE BEAMAN: The New South Wales EPA and government has set ambitious waste targets, both in terms of waste avoidance and in greater recycling and recovery of material if we do generate it as waste. At the end of 2014, we just released a seven year strategy, the Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery strategy, and that has six key focus areas. It’s about having programs in place to reduce the amount of waste being generated in the first place; it’s to increase recycling at a household, commercial and construction level; it’s about increasing the diversion of waste away from landfill; it’s about establishing community recycling centres across New South Wales to make it easy for the community to get rid of problem wastes and to do so in a safe manner; and finally it’s to reduce illegal dumping and prevent littering.

So there’s a very progressive agenda at the moment in New South Wales. And we’ve been able to have that funded from a waste levy. So, for every tonne of waste that’s disposed of in the populated areas, there’s a government levy that’s imposed on that waste disposal, and the purpose of that levy is to make recycling more cost effective against traditional landfill. And as part of that income stream, the government’s allocated over 465.7 million dollars for us to drive this change. And the change is really around three aspects, which are: greater education and community engagement, delivering new and improved infrastructure, and the last is about having a strong regulatory framework that underpins it, so there’s clarity right across the sector and the community of what the government’s expectations are around the rules about managing waste and recycled products.

TOS: Excellent – and there is a great emphasis on organic waste, I know – you’re directing 70 million dollars of that to an organics program. So what is the key focus for you in terms of organics recycling at the moment?

SB: It’s really around those seven aspects. We’ve just run a series of grant rounds where we’ve got forty three million dollars available of that seventy million for new infrastructure. These are organic processing facilities that are typically a combination of food and garden organics processing and is usually around some form of composting technology. We didn’t have the infrastructure in place, so we’re pulling this stuff out of the bins but we needed the processing capacity to be built, and all that’s being built at the moment.

Our local authorities, our councils that provide the services to the community needed access to new and improved collection systems – and typically that has been mobile garbage bins. So, we’ve funded four hundred and forty three thousand new garbage bins and kitchen caddies, so people can sort out their waste in the kitchen and put it into the right garbage bin.

And this is an exciting one that we’ve just released, but we’ve got four million dollars around market development. And this is around the concept that now that we’ve pulled this organic material out of the system and it’s being processed in these facilities, we have to ensure that we’ve got sustainable and resilient end-markets for this material to be used. If the material gets composted it can go to urban restoration; it can got o mine-site rehabilitation; it can go back to farmland and pasture organic improvements. The thing about Australian soils is that they’re very low in organics typically, and then farming practices over the last two hundred years has depleted those organics even further.

So there’s great multiple benefits here with us taking this stuff out of landfill, processing it and putting it back on the land, improve the water-holding capacity of the land, and also improve the nutrient uptake in some of those soils that are organic poor. So we see this as a great opportunity.

We’re also, from that market development work, looking at how we can assist industry to improve the quality of the compost. Because it’s coming from the domestic waste stream, typically, it’s important to educate communities that they can’t put their used batteries into the organics bin, because it has a consequence: if that battery breaks open, you spread lead through the compost material and renders it useless for use on urban development or agricultural use.

So it’s a multi-faceted program. That’s the thing that’s really exciting about this, it’s trying to attack the issue on a couple of fronts: education and community engagement, industry development, the infrastructure component, and then having the regulations behind it that gives the community the confidence that using recycled products is the way to go.

TOS: Very good – and I’d like to talk about the importance of this strong policy framework that underpins everything and how that has contributed to the program’s success?

SB: I think the thing about Waste Less Recycle More is that success is really going to be attributable to having a really strong policy, certainty and clarity around it, and that’s why I started with the Waste Avoidance and Resource Recovery strategy. The government has set this long-term strategy, it’s adopted the targets to increase recycling, reduce illegal dumping and to prevent littering, and that really gives us the instruction that we need to go and deliver these. These are government priorities, and those priorities really stem from community expectations – the community wants to see these services being offered and want to see these improvements.

But the fact that we’ve actually been able to align a very strong policy commitment directly from government, and have that underpinned by a very strong funding program, really gives us the recipe we need to be able to deliver this program. And I think it changes the confidence in the community. They can see and engage with the EPA and government on waste and recycling now, and we’re able to provide that information out to the community – we have an excellent website called Love Food Hate Waste, which is around waste avoidance.

But this also has changed the approach by the waste sector, where it’s moving away from the traditional waste collection and waste disposal and towards trying to be a part of this new circular economy and a recycling and resource recovery agenda. So we see this as a great opportunity to change the agenda in New South Wales.

TOS: That’s very exciting. And let’s talk more about the market development side of things for a moment. Developing compost markets is quite a big task – can you tell me a little more about your plans here, and are you anticipating any challenges?

SB: with the markets for compost, I think we’re really pulling a lot of material out of the system, and we need to be careful. That’s why we’re investing in a market development program, so we get that balance right and we don’t disturb the system too much by pushing too much material through the system, thereby increasing the supply and affecting prices. So we need to think carefully and we’re working in partnership with industry around exploring how we can help industry and local government to stimulate the markets so that we’re actually resilient for the longer term, and when more material comes through we’ve actually generated the demand at the end-use level. And that the farmers and the urban restoration workers and so on are more comfortable in using the organics in their soils and agricultural systems, so we can get that market to mature as fast as we can and it then becomes a self-sustaining system.

TOS: It’s great that there is so much investment going into it. But moving out again – are there any pressing challenges you’re facing at the moment in terms of organics recycling – or any problem areas you’re focusing on?

SB: The single main challenge for us is contamination. This is around trying to educate the community and industry. And this is why it’s a very interesting program, because people have things in their household that they mightn’t know how to get rid of. Oil, paint, gas bottles, batteries, smoke detectors, light bulbs… And so if we find that they’re unsure, they’ll often inadvertently do the wrong thing and put it into the wrong bin.

And this is why part of another program of Waste Less Recycle More is the community recycling centres. So there’s another seventy million dollars to build these drop-off centres, and the aim is to have eighty-six of these centres where you can drop off all those problem items you’ve got in the household for free. So if we can make it easy for the community to easily dispose of these problem materials, and also educate them on why it’s important that they don’t drop these materials into their organics bins, then that’s going to keep improving the product quality of our organics and compost.

It’s a real issue for us, and we’re starting to do some exciting work on rolling out a state-wide education campaign to help improve the knowledge and behaviour of householders. And that’s what we’re starting to work on next.

TOS: And all this comes from the funding from the waste levy. Do you consider this waste levy to be the most important, or crucial part of the program’s success?

SB: I’d describe the Waste and Resource Recovery framework as an ecosystem – I don’t think there’s one part that dominates over the others. I think it’s getting all the parts to work in concert with each other. So it’s about having a very strong direction from government to do the right thing. The government has said that we want to achieve these very ambitious targets, and that sends a very strong message. It’s about having a financial and economic tool with the waste levy and that we’ve set a price signal for our landfills and we don’t want landfills to be the predominant processing option – we want people to think a bit more broadly. It’s about having education as well, and that sort of engagement with industry and community so that people are aware and we know how to influence the knowledge, attitudes and behaviours.

None of this works if you don’t have infrastructure, and all this falls apart if you don’t have a regulatory regime that sets very clear standards and has offence provisions that say that if you don’t meet these standards, there will be very serious consequences. And I think, from my end, it’s not just the levy that’s important – although it is a very important aspect – but it’s getting all aspects to work well together that is important. And if we get it all operating together in a very clear and consistent manner, I think that’s when we’re going to get the best outcome.

TOS: It will be very exciting to see how it all works, and I’m sure you’re very busy focusing on this now – but as a final question now – I’d love to know – what’s next for the EPA in New South Wales?

SB: There are two things that are exciting for us. Looking forward to future population growth, and hopefully less waste generation, and looking at where we should have the next generation of infrastructure. Where should it be installed? Are there areas around the state where we’re short on infrastructure, and how can we stimulate that investment from the local community or industry? So it’s about making sure we’ve got infrastructure in the right locations.

And the second really exciting thing we’re working on – and we’ve just released it for consultation – is a new state-wide education strategy called Changing Behaviour Together. And this is really around building a platform for a conversation with the community at all levels – with local government, industry and residents – and finding out what their needs are in relation to their knowledge, attitudes and behaviours around waste and recycling, and how can we help standardise that and run state-wide programs to focus on that behaviour change that really underpins our investment in infrastructure.

TOS: Okay, so there’s a real focus on education and outreach there…

SB: Yes, absolutely. I think you can have very complex systems of multiple bins and recycling plants, but it takes an engaged community to make these systems work to their optimum. If people aren’t using these systems correctly, and they don’t understand why it’s important to separate properly, these systems do tend to struggle. And that’s where you get this issue of contamination really raising it’s head. So, I think you really get good bang for your buck from your investment in infrastructure if you have it underpinned by a strong education program.

TOS: Great stuff. And we’ll be following the progress very closely – and best of with the program in the next few years!

PROCESSOR’S PERSPECTIVE: EXPANDING MARKETS A CHALLENGE

THE ORGANIC STREAM: And that was Steve Beaman of the EPA giving us an insight into the NWS’s organic recycling plans. Steve mentioned the need to be very careful in increasing supply of organics to not upset the market (blah?) – and this is indeed something that requires attention. What are the challenges that industry anticipates with this increase, and how big of a task will it be to develop new markets for organic products, compost in particular?

Another key challenge might be contamination rate – with plans to increase kerbside collection, are processors preparing for an increase in contamination as well?

We put these questions to Robert Niccol of ANL and this is what he told us…

TOS: Hi Rob, thanks for coming on the show. Just before we begin, can you give us a short introduction to Australian Natural Landscape?

ROBERT NICCOL: We began life as a landscape construction company about forty five years ago, and that grew into looking for materials to use in landscape supplies. Pat Soars who owns the company started going over the mountains and getting truckloads of bark, and coming back into Sydney and selling as mulch and what have you. We then got into composting, greenwaste, biosolids and all the urban waste streams that are around nowadays.

We currently compost or process about five hundred thousand tonnes of sorted organic streams at the moment. We’re a very strong landscape and agricultural compost supplies company. You name it, we’re into it – we’ve a very strong consumer market of packaged products, supply chain, bulk material supply and landscape construction – that sort of thing.

TOS: Right, and so as a processor on the ground, the government’s plans will have an impact on your business and indeed the industry as a whole. What will this impact be, and are there any concerns in the industry about this increase in supply of organics?

RN: The government, to their credit, is spending a quite extraordinary amount of money in industry support and in terms of processing and market development in a whole rage of areas. It’s the best part of half a billion dollars. It’s a huge amount of money, and we will never see the like of that again.

I think there are some concerns about whether or not we can grow the markets sustainably to consume all the additional tonnages. So I think that is a big ask. The government is certainly supporting market development of about seventy thousand tonnes of additional uptake, but the increase of supply will be greater than that, so there’s potentially an issue there.

Whether or not that becomes a problem will really hinge on how effectively the market development money is implemented and spent; what sort of strategies come out; how those markets are developed; and can we get structural change in the bigger markets, like the agricultural sector, which is really where we see the main growth potential being in terms of demand. So, is it going to be a struggle? Yes. I think there are a lot of opportunities for lots of businesses, but the additional tonnes…yeah, it will be a struggle.

TOS: What are some of the main challenges, or concerns, you have about market development – what barriers to you face at the moment as an industry that will need to be addressed in order for this to work?

RN: Where there’s an issue and a debate that needs to be had – and it has been had some extent – is that you do have different business models, and I’m sure that’s the same all over the world. In our case, we’re one of a number of private companies that started as a horticultural supplies company, and that business has grown and eventually got into what would be considered as the resource recovery and waste sector. But at heart, we are a horticultural supplies company, selling horticultural products.

Then you’ve got the other business model, which tends to be the larger corporatized kinds – those sorts of businesses who are in the waste sector. You know, the real waste driven companies. They don’t come into the market with a horticultural supplies philosophy – they come in with a waste management philosophy, and the two are quite different. Their business model is very much about getting cost recovery at the gate as soon as the material comes in, and then the products of their processing go into the marketplace at a very low dollar value. Whereas those of us in the horticultural supplies tend to have a lower gate fee because we’re expecting to have a value recognised in the output at the end. And they are different models, and there are obvious difficulties with that in the marketplace when you have those two models producing an output that’s competing differently with a different economic structure. That’s a problem.

I think that is something our industry has struggled with and the government has struggled with, and I don’t know that there is a good answer to that. But the difficulty is that when you’re looking to grow markets, like the agricultural sector – and we’re particularly looking at cropping and grazing – where there are more marginal growing sectors anyway, they have some very good years, but they have some very lean years in between. So they’re a relatively low return sector anyway. So you’re going into the hardest part of a market to actually get money out of them, in terms of value for your product.

And the products in those sort of applications are effective, but they’re still competing with fertilisers and bedded down systems. So part of what we need to do is engage in those systems, and get product uptake in those systems. They are inherently a conservative sector, so you need to get those people who have been growing often multigenerationally in a particular fashion. You need to engage with them and give them some comfort that what we have to offer is of value, and it’s sustainable and will work for them with their current cost models.

So we’re looking to actually see, out of the market engagement, the real value of what we have to offer recognised, and to try and penetrate those markets and show the effectiveness of the product. We have to do it at a competitive price, obviously, but unless you break that nexus, that market will never exist. If we don’t get past this first hurdle, where they’re used to using synthetic fertilisers, then it will never change.

TOS: Yes and here you mention education and outreach – which are key components to developing markets in New South Wales?

RN: I think when you look at the current supplies into those sectors, you have larger, agricultural chemical supplies companies who have been supplying into that sector for many, many years; their data is very good and they have a history of use with those products working well. They’ve engaged well, they have a lot of money behind them, and they’ve been able to set up their supply into that sector, well supported with good data, good technology and good advice.

Whereas we’re stepping into that without the dollars behind a Monsanto type of company. We don’t have those sort of resources and we’re stepping into a conservative area, so the education and engagement, and the extension of the good information and data that we have at the moment…we haven’t been very effective in getting that out. So there will be a lot of people who I think we will get to change – and are probably quite keen to change – but we haven’t yet spoken to them. We haven’t engaged with them and we haven’t explained the case well. So, the education side is very important.

TOS: And going back to the increase supply and perhaps another challenge you’re facing: the EPA is focusing a lot of their efforts on educating people about putting materials in the right bins and so on – really getting people to understand the importance of recycling in an effort to keep contamination low. With kerbside collection expanding in the next few years, are you concerned about contamination? What has been your experience so far?

RN: We’ve had quite a number of different contracts over the last twent y five years. Often the contamination is an issue given that most of these streams come out of local government. So they’re within a local area, and that local government facility or waste system is the driver for the recovery of whatever the new stream is – when they decide to introduce a green bin and kerbside collection for green and food waste, or whatever it is. If that council or local government authority has an environmental philosophy from top to bottom, where everything that flows from the top down is about closing the loop and understanding that the outputs of these materials will be coming back to our environment, then they see the issue is about contamination and how it affects the value or quality of the product. And they set up really strong and clear systems that are linked to their council philosophy.

When they start, the new services come in and that’s when you have early issues when it’s new to people and they don’t necessarily know what’s going on. If you have a council that sets up a contract, it’s well aware of that and as soon as those issues arise, they’re proactive – they don’t want the contamination and engage with local residents – and generally speaking, those issues evaporate because they’re driven from the council and local community. And someone has a contract to collect it, and the collecting contractor is a really important part of that as well because they’re the ones picking up the bins – it’ll end up coming to us and as a processor, it’s critical to us that we don’t have contamination. But if you have everyone in that loop with the same general philosophy, contamination isn’t an issue, because if you as a resident don’t care and you keep on putting garbage in your bin, they take away the service.

If on the other hand, and we’ve certainly had contracts where that’s not a driver within the government, then it’s very difficult to manage – because as the end contractor, you don’t have the power in the process to stop that contamination coming in, and that becomes very difficult. So it’s very much down to education and I know the state government is engaging very strongly with local government, and that’s absolutely where it needs to be – because they’re the drivers of the contracts; they’re the people who sign the contracts up with people like us, so if they’re not supportive of it and don’t have structures at the end of the day to remove a service if it comes to that, then we’re stuck with whatever comes in the truck.

TOS: And the government’s cooperation with industry is another important aspect. So, building up relationships and strong communication channels between them is crucial for success, I imagine?

RN: That’s absolutely critical. We’ve run a couple of different grants within our business, and I think personally that the process that we’ve gone through has just been exceptional. They’ve had people within government that understand our sector that we can go and talk to. So if you’re that person, I can go to you and say, “Eleen, this is the grant we’re thinking of putting” and I get very clear guidance, such as, “Yes that’s good, but I’d think about doing that, that and that”, or, “No, it doesn’t fit within the guidelines”. So very quickly you get an answer as to whether the idea you have fits with what they want. If it does, there is an opportunity to get economic consultants in to evaluate the business case and give you advice on whether or not they think economics of what you put forward is logical. After we’ve won our grant, they then have consultants – I think we have about twenty hours of free consultancy after the grant is approved to get through the approvals process and to get thought issues you have in in actually getting your facility built, or whatever it is, once the grant is up. And there’s support after the grant.

I think, really, as a private business, you can’t ask for more than that. It’s been very, very good. It’s a lot of money that they’re spending and it’s a pretty big achievement to get that sort of money out of treasury for our sector, so I think they’ve done a pretty amazing job, really, for the complexity of the programs they’re looking for.

TOS: So it’s an exciting time now in New South Wales, it’ll be very interesting to see how it all goes…

RN: Oh, definitely. It’s certainly going to be a lot of activity and it will be interesting to see where we are in our sector over the next couple of years, because an extra hundred and sixty thousand tonnes of material is what they’re proposing to generate, and that’s a lot on top of what we’re currently doing.

Multistory buildings are often considered the final frontier of organics recycling – and it’s easy to see why. Densely populated with little space, there are a number of challenges to tackle when setting up a program. In episode two, we pick off where we left off in episode one and continue to explore these challenges, and the factors that will impact your program. With guests from cities around the world, we discuss tenant participation, reaching out to the different demographics, the differences between voluntary and mandatory programs, and bin lining strategies.

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EPISODE SLIDESHOW

Transcript:

CHAPTER 5: COMMITMENT FROM TENANTS

THE ORGANIC STREAM: As I said in the first episode, successful organics recycling is all about building relationships. Once you have established a relationship with the building manager or owner, the focus is going to be on getting the tenants on board and participating.

And this is not always easy.

Introducing an organics recycling program anywhere requires a commitment of time and resources into education, face-to-face engagement, tailoring your outreach strategies to specific demographics…and sustaining relationships.

In general: engagement strategies will consist of targeted outreach efforts well in advance of the program roll-out. Then, after roll-out, the focus is on increasing participation with continuous on-site education, gathering feedback, reworking flyers and messaging – and so on.

With multistory buildings, there are a few extra challenges you can face in terms of tenant engagement.

Firstly, the turnover of tenants – which can be quite high depending on the property – will mean you need to ensure that every new person moving into the building is educated and aware of the program. This is often taken on by the building managers.

As well as the transient nature of the populations, there is sometimes a lack of a community feeling in a multistory building – which can lead to lack of interest in attending building meetings, for example, or just a lack of interest in how well the building is performing. As I said many times in the first episode, every building is different and your outreach strategies will have to be tailored to meet the building’s unique challenges – which includes getting tenants invested in the program.

We won’t be delving too deep into the engagement and education strategies here, because we’re focusing heavily on this in our upcoming case-study episode. But it’s important to get an overview of kind of work it involves. And for this I want to take us back to New York.

Last episode, we heard from Jessica Schreiber of the DSNY about their voluntary organics recycling pilot program. When we spoke about getting tenants involved and engaged, Jessica summed up the basic strategy they employ.

JESSICA SCHREIBER: Whenever you’re working with the public you should know your audience. So, we do a lot of work with community boards, because they’re a good window into what’s important in that community and how they’re accessing information. So sometimes we start at the community board level and then work down. We do try to have the whole range of ways for people to become engaged. So, we always have flyers and paper brochures, we always have the website; we’ve launched social media, so we have Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – hopefully to reach everybody. It’s a challenge: eight million people who are all very different. So it’s always a challenge to try and reach everybody.

TOS: So as you can hear, New York, like many other cities I’ve talked to, are using a lot of different avenues to reach the tenants – including flyers, website, and social media. But key to every strategy, it seems, is face-to-face communication.

This brings me back to an episode we did last year with director of the Recycling Unit of the DSNY’s Bureau of Waste Prevention, Bridget Anderson.

At the time, I quizzed Bridget about their outreach campaigns, and she stressed the importance of taking a hands-on approach.

BRIDGET ANDERSON: Once an area becomes a pilot area where people are receiving the program itself, the on the ground outreach has been extremely useful. Not everybody reads the mailers: if you receive a mailing from the city, it might end up directly in your recycling bin – hopefully your recycling bin! And so, having people out there on the ground during bin deliveries to really make sure people understand the program is important. The elected officials and community boards have also often hosted meetings where people can come and ask questions.

During those periods, we’ve encountered people who are just so excited about the program, and we’ve also encountered people who say, “this really isn’t for me”. So we really try to change hearts and minds, and having people on the ground, and face-to-face communication, has been critical to getting people to even try the program.

TOS: Now, this is primarily focused on engaging tenants at the beginning. But what about keeping up the level of commitment after program roll out?

I put this question to Enzo Favoino when I called him a couple of weeks ago, looking for insights into Milan’s multistory strategies. Enzo is a researcher and advisor at the Scuola Agraria del Parco di Monza in Italy and the scientific coordinator of Zero Waste Europe and we’ll be hearing more from him on Milan’s success in the next episode – but I wanted to include his answer to my question here because what he had to say was very interesting…

ENZO FAVOINO: One thing I would like to stress is that it may seem a paradox, but normally we tend to have the best results the very first week we start the system, both from the quantitative and qualitative angles. It’s what we call the “shocking” effect: we literally flood them with information and awareness campaigns. So the very first week we always have the best results, which goes against the so-called received wisdom, because normally they tell us, “No, it will take ages to have people educated”. No! They behave right away. Then, we have to keep the good level of results, because if you don’t provide the feedback to people telling them the way it is working, what are the critical issues, how to improve, and so on, then there will be some relaxation from the commitment. Because maybe they think the local authorities aren’t focused so much on the system, and then they wonder why they should care about it either. But if they get targeted every so often with messages saying, “Hey, you’re doing well, we have saved such an amount of money”, and so on and so forth, this helps keep up the good levels both from the quantitative and qualitative angles.

TOS: This is an important point that Enzo brings up. Without consistent communication right from the beginning, it may seem to tenants that the program is not much of a priority to the city, and people will start putting it lower on their priority list as well.

CHAPTER 6: MULTISTORY BUILDING DEMOGRAPHICS

TOS: Populations in high-density urban areas are extremely diverse. People from different countries, backgrounds, family situations, cultures and life experiences all make the city their home. And multistory residential buildings encapsulate this aspect of city life quite well.

Reaching out to tenants will require an understanding of the demographics in each building you work with. And from speaking to many program managers, it seems that the demographics that gain the most focus are language and ethnicity, and to a certain extent, age as well.

JASON SANDERS: We’re here today in Los Angeles, California, in the downtown region off of four hundred South Main street…

TOS: At a busy café just outside the Old Bank District Building sunny in Los Angeles, we spent time with Jason Sanders – national Zero Waste manager for EcoSafe Zero Waste who helped implement the organics recycling pilot program in the building – an eight floor multistory building with all but the first floor being residential.

JS: So there’re seventy total units at this building, and each floor has a refuse room that has a compost bin inside, and then a chute for their landfill and recyclables as well.

TOS: We spent the afternoon speaking to both him and Jessica Aldridge of waste hauler Athens Services about their experiences in working together to roll out and tracking the performance of their organics collection pilot program in LA. We also discussed the challenges they faced rolling out the program – and here, Jason shared with us their experiences in tailoring their program to the different demographics.

JS: One of the challenges that we’ve seen with setting up these multifamily food scrap programs is adopting the program to meet the specific building’s demographic needs. We have language barriers so we always have to adapt our education and outreach materials to work with that particular language, whether that’s Mandarin or Spanish or English. We have found that certain demographics, such as a more progressive and environmentally focused age group – from your Millennials to Generation X – adopt these programs more rapidly, than some of your older demographics. So it’s always a challenge trying to adapt the program to meet the specific building’s demographics. Here at this Old Bank District Building, we actually have a very progressive demographic that easily adopted the program. So we have demographics that really understand the full cycle of the organics here, where others might not have that knowledge.

TOS: Understanding the full cycle of organics.

This is something I want to focus on for a moment because it proves just how important it is to highlight the connection between the organics we throw in the bin, soil health, and the food we produce.

Jason suggests that it is the younger, more progressive demographics that have a ready understanding of this cycle, which makes implementing a program much easier. And showing tenants the connection between our food waste and the soil can be a great strategy for education or promotion of the program.

JS: We brought some of the finished compost that this material turns into, and we showed the residents the finished compost. So we educated them on what their food scraps turns into, which I believe was a really key component because a lot of the people that live in cities don’t quite understand that their food scraps actually turns into good-looking soil amendment. So that then clicked in their heads and of why it was important for them to separate their food scraps.

TOS: Environmentally aware tenants can be a great asset for a program. Even though this can often be a small demographic within a building – it only takes a few to make a difference. This is something I learned from Jessica Schreiber, when I asked her how many people were environmentally aware in the buildings she works with.

JESSICA SCHREIBER: From the tenant meetings that I’ve attended, I would say there was maybe ten to twenty percent who would ask questions like that, and then the other eight to ninety percent are much more concerned about whether it’s convenient, do they have to do it, and is it going to smell or bring rodents. So there’s that small group that is very interested in where this goes and why we’re doing it, if it stays local and how it’s composted. And I think because those people exist and ask those questions, it’s a greater educational moment for the whole building. Because everyone has those logistic questions and convenience questions, and then it’s that one step further – the “why” question – that I think is where it really becomes internalised.

TOS: But what about the main demographics to factor in your program? How do cities work with the different languages and ethnicities to reach everyone equally?

A few weeks back, I contacted Marcia Rutan to speak about the very recent mandatory composting program in Seattle, USA, and her work with education and outreach in the multistory residential buildings there.

MARCIA RUTAN: My name is Marcia Rutan and I work with Seattle Public Utilities in Seattle, Washington. And I work on multi-family food waste and recycling programs. My official title is Community Recycling Program Manager, and I’ve been here eight years this June.

TOS: Now, Seattle has a diverse population of six hundred and sixty thousand and over five thousand apartment buildings, and Marcia shared with me some of their valuable experience in working with the various demographics in the city.

MR: So we provide these two basic flyers for this program – Where Does It Go and the Food Waste flyer – in eighteen different languages. Now, these have all been translated, but the next step that we’re learning more about in the last year or so is something called Trans-creation. And that is something where the materials are actually made culturally relevant, as well as the wording being correctly translated, so it doesn’t mean something odd in the other language. So that will be the next step – going through these different languages and making them as pertinent and relevant as possible to the folks who are using them.

Also, when I go out to do presentations, I always ask if there are people speaking other languages who will be there, and we always bring interpreters if needed. We are also expanding our engagement of community liaisons, either through community-based organisations or individuals who are good educators: people who look like the people in that particular community.

TOS: And do you focus on reaching out to any other demographics? I’ve heard age mentioned as well as an important demographic for example…

MR: Sure. Yes, we do have some focus on that, thought I would say not as much as on the ethnic diversity. Now for instance, I am an older person at this point, and I go out to a lot of the senior properties, and they really like that because I’m closer to them in age. They can relate to me and I can say, “I’m going to be retiring soon, and I know you’re on a limited budget, but stillwe want to consider buying recycled products because that’s what keeps recycling going”…so that sort of thing. They can related to me, so I cover the older group in a lot of ways. And we also go to a lot of different festivals and fairs, and so we really make an effort to reach a diversity of folks through those festivals – whether it’s a university district street fair that was just this last weekend, which was very much fosuced on younger people. So that’s another aspect. We do have Twitter, we do have Facebook. And that’s not just for the younger people: we know that a lot of people of ethnic diversity are on their smartphones, and that that’s a primary computer for them. So, it’s just a great way to reach a lot of folks.

TOS: So as you can hear, there are a lot of different ways to reach out and a lot to factor in. Again, you have to be prepared to invest a substantial amount time and resources into outreach if you are to be successful. And it’s a long-term thing – engaging the tenants is a never-ending process.

And having someone from within a specific community on your outreach team can be especially important for connecting to that community.

CHAPTER 7: NATURE OF ORGANICS PROGRAM – VOLUNTARY OR MANDATORY

TOS: Throughout this special edition, we’ve been discussing both mandatory and voluntary programs, and we touched on a few of the differences between them in episode one – particularly in relation to getting building managers on-board.

The nature of your program will have an impact on the people you’re trying to engage and on your approach, as we’ve seen.

With voluntary programs, it’s all about winning people’s hearts and minds as there is no mandate to put fire under people’s feet. While this may mean you have less buildings participating, I learned from Jessica Schreiber in New York that working with interested buildings only has some unique benefits.

JESSICA SCHREIBER: I think the benefit of voluntary is that we can work with buildings that we have relationships with, buildings who are eager and want to do this. So we may get less material with the voluntary group, because it’s not mandated, but because they’re very engaged and are really supportive, we’re hoping that material is cleaner than it would be had we just said everybody needs to do this. So at this point we’re sort of hoping for more clean material, and a very voluntary and very feel-good program, versus a mandatory where maybe we would get more tonnage but it might not be as high of quality.

TOS: Now, Jessica mentions the feel-good aspect of the program, and this made me wonder just how important that feel-good factor is for success. So I asked her – how important is the popularity of the program, and how much does it depend on creating a positive experience for buildings and tenants?

JS: I think the popularity is a key part of it. One is that we’re able to show that there’s interest. So, we’re hoping to add a fourth truck to Manhattan this summer and that’s just based off the fact that we’ve had so many inquiries, and we know that we should be able to create a full route just from the inquiries that we have. So the popularity of the program is a huge part of it. And the other half of that is that we want to make sure the service consistent, that the education up-front is good, and that we really take a special interest in these buildings so they feel supported. Because all that makes them more likely to tell the next building, or their friend who’s also a super, “I have this program, it’s easier than it looks. It’s really simple and you should do it”. So, we’re hoping the city support on our end – the work that we’re doing to bring the buildings on board – is part of it, and that the buildings spread word and that popularity grows.

TOS: Mandatory programs, in contrast, can be a lot more challenging, where the aim is to reach full compliance and at the same time keep the contamination rate as low as possible. This means increasing education and outreach efforts, dealing with difficult buildings and handing out fines – as we heard from Alexa Keitly in the last episode.

This can be daunting, and it’s generally considered best practice to work in steps: Beginning as a voluntary program, for example, and transitioning to mandatory once the system is rolling and the kinks have been ironed out. This can take many years.

In Seattle, they took this step-by-step approach – first making it mandatory to provide organic waste carts in apartment buildings in 2011 before moving to the composting mandate that is in place from this year. This was a very effective tactic, as Marcia Rutan explained to me.

MARCIA RUTAN: There was a lot of work already that went into building the foundation for this. Basically, in Setpember of 2011, Seattle city council made it mandatory that all multi-family properties would have food waste carts. So there was somebody I hired and who has worked with me for a number of years, who was doing technical outreach while I was handling the educational outreach and phone trouble-shooting. So we definitely got a certain flood of inquireies about this, and starting in 2009, really, we were working very hard to get all of the properties up and going with the food waste carts. And by December 2011, a few months after that law went into effect, we basically knew we were going to roll-out carts to anybody who was left over out of the five-thousand who hadn’t signed-up. And in fact there were only a few hundred left. So we really worked hard to get that subscription base established.

Now, just because a property had a cart, did not mean they were using it. There were definitely instances where they stashed it in the closet in a store room and they didn’t want to deal with it. They just thought, “I’ll just pay my monthly subscription and I’m not going to deal with the program”. So the next stage has been participation – and we’ve done a lot of work with on-site education and technical assistance to build the participation. And we could tell who wasn’t participating, because we would get reports from the drivers who knew which properties consistently didn’t have carts out or where there were carts missing continually. So we would get those reports and target those properties – especially the large ones, because there was more impact there.

So we definitely had built up some level of participation. And then this next stage has really caught the attention of a number of properties who are very concerned about the fine and want to either get their service going, or improve it substantially so they don’t get the fine.

TOS: So here you get a sense not only of the differences in challenges and benefits between the programs, but how much time it can take to build up participation and prepare for mandatory organics collection. As we heard from Marcia, Seattle have been working since 2009 on introducing collection in multistory buildings and this definitely helped smooth the transition.

Since there are so many facets involved in setting up programs in multistory buildings, this is no surprise. No matter the nature of the program, it’s important to be patient and keep a long-term perspective in mind.

CHAPTER 8: BIN LINING STRATEGIES & COMPOSTABLE PLASTICS

TOS: We’ve nearly come to the end of the episode and there is one last topic to discuss.

At all stages of the organics recycling process, the organic stream needs to be kept as clean as possible. Keeping contamination low is a constant battle, and how the organics are transported from household bins to recycling containers and then to the collection trucks can have a great impact.

What we’re talking about here is lining strategies.

With lining strategies we’re back in the same familiar situation of trying to balance tenant and building manager convenience with practicality for program managers. On one hand, tenants (and building staff as well) will be more comfortable using something like plastic bags for collecting food waste, and on the other, composting facilities want as clean a stream as possible so ideally it would be best to have no bin linings whatsoever.

So how can we balance these two sides?

Well, first of all, there is a general lining hierarchy that many cities adhere to – giving people a list of options for carrying their food waste from best to worst.

JESSICA SCHREIBER: So we give people a lining hierarchy. Always our first choice is no lining, and you can just rinse the bin out. The second choice would be paper – either lining it with a paper bag or newspaper, because that’s going to break down with the food. Third choice would be compostable bags, and last choice – which we really don’t want, but are willing to accept – is clear plastic bags.

TOS: Now, in terms of having no bin lining at all – this can be a bit too much for both tenants and building managers alike and increase the yuck factor, as they will be faced with having to clean out bins regularly – something Marcia Rutan pointed out to me.

MARCIA RUTAN: We did a test project in about 2007-2008, to test how this would work or can it even work in multi-family properties, and one of the results of that project was that the property managers really want a compostable liner in the cart. It was not quite a deal-breaker, but it was close – like a “give us that liner or else”, kind of feeling. So that’s been one thing that has helped with the “ick” factor.

TOS: Now, Jessica mentioned that New York accepts, as a last resort, polyethylene plastic bags for those who would not participate otherwise.

While this is not an ideal situation, and contributes to higher contamination levels, it does highlight the fact that many people are so used to the practicality and cleanliness of using plastic – particularly for wet materials like organics – that they may shy away from participating without having that level of comfort.

This is where compostable plastic bags can sometimes be a great benefit.

MARCIA RUTAN: We have just done a test project with some compostable bag dispensers. This is something that properties can hang up right near the compost cart, and then residents can pull out a little green approved-compostable bag, take it back up to their apartment home and use it, and bring it back down and take another bag. And that also reduces odours, and keeps the flies down. I was quite resistant to these bags at first, because it just seemed like one more thing to have to buy and use, and was not in-line with my waste prevention ethic. But I have become quite sold on them for at least certain situations. I think they definitely work, and where people can afford these dispensers I think it makes a lot of sense.

TOS: While they can be a great solution – there are some challenges to be aware of. Not all compostable bags are alike – some composting facilities may not be able to give them the time needed for them to break down and others may not accept compostable plastics at all. So finding a facility that will accept the bags being used will be essential.

And New York has had extra challenges in terms of compostable plastic bags – availability. Here’s DSNY’s Bridget Anderson from last year once again, sharing their experiences.

BRIDGET ANDERSON: The availability of those compostable bags has been a problem. It’s taken us a while to get the bags into retail stores – there are also online outlets for the bags. The price of the bags has been a problem; some people say the bags are to expensive and they won’t use them, or that they would participate in the program if they could use the bags, but the bags are too expensive – that’s an example of something that’s been a challenge…Our hope is that eventually the compostable bags will maybe become cheaper and be more available, and then we can switch out the regular plastic bags.

TOS: Lining strategy will have a big impact on your program’s success – and there are pros and cons to each of the possible solutions you can choose. Availability, affordability, convenience and contamination are key elements to pay attention to, as well as giving people a range of options to suit their situation.

EPISODE END

TOS: And here we leave the topic of challenges and factors to take into account when setting up a program.

We’ve covered a lot of ground here on the show in this episode – hopefully it’s helped you get a solid understanding of the main factors and challenges faced with implementing an organics program in multistory buildings. And hopefully we’ve helped answer at least some of your questions too. But if not, never fear, because we are only getting started.

Stay tuned for the next episode, where we invite more program managers and recycling specialists to discuss case studies and explore the most successful strategies for the all the issues we’ve addressed so far.

In urban areas all around the world, we are stretching towards the sky – to save space on the ground, and make room for our growing populations. In this Multistory Special, we explore the major challenges and factors we need to pay attention to when planning an organics program in a multistory residential building, and we invite guests from cities around the world who are leading the way with their programs to share their experiences. This week, we’re taking a look at the main challenges we face today and the major factors we need to address when we start recycling organics in any type of multi-story building. This will lay the foundation for the episodes to come.

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CHAPTER 1: BUILDING TYPES & CATEGORIES

THE ORGANIC STREAM: There is no unified classification of multi-story buildings. Usually they are categorised in terms of height. A typical description would be low-rise, mid-rise and high-rise buildings.

Low rise buildings have very few floors. Again, there are no unified rules here, but they usually are no more than 3 stories high. These are quite easy to work with and usually have a centralised collection point.

Mid-rise would generally be anything above 3 floors but below 8 floors. And high rises, then, are anything above 8 floors. These are typically the buildings we’re talking about in this episode – as they are the most challenging of the three categories.

It might also be useful to categorise the buildings by the type of waste and recycling facilities they have – since this will have a big bearing on how you approach the building. Buildings usually have either a chute system (single or multi chute), waste rooms on every floor, or a single collection area on the ground floor, garage, or in the courtyard.

No matter how you categorise them – it’s important to remember that each individual building will have its own challenges and advantages. For this reason, it could be useful to categorise them in terms of level of difficulty. This can take into account a range of issues that will effect your program like for example – whether there’s high turnover of tenants…. a lack of space or perhaps ventilation issues in the building…or if the building manager uninterested.

CHAPTER 2: LOGISTICS: WASTE ROOMS, CHUTES

TOS: So…where exactly are you going to put your bins, and how will the hauler access them? Are you working in a building with limited space and maybe ventilation issues? Is there a chute system in the building? Do you want to use it for organics?

These are some of the key logistical question you’ll ask yourself in the beginning. And your decisions and how you implement them will have a great impact on success.

(Introduction to Linda Corso)

TOS: This is Linda Corso, manager of Cathedral Hill Plaza on 1333 Gough Street, San Francisco.

We took a trip to California last month to get a first-person view of the organics recycling program in the state and some of the buildings involved that have been successful. And we met with Linda, who was kind enough to show us around and tell us how the system works in her building. Cathedral Hill Plaza was built in the 1960s, so it’s an older building – it has 169 units, with 14 stories altogether. And Linda began a composting program at the building before it was even mandatory.

LINDA CORSO: When I first read about it in the paper that Recology was starting composting, I started looking into it and talked to them about getting composting bins, which we initially put in the garage, and then just sent a memo to our tenants that composting was available. It didn’t work so well!

TOS: Linda told us that nobody wanted to carry their icky compost bags all the way down to the garage when it was easier just to keep dumping it in the trash bin on their floor.

LINDA CORSO: Then I contacted SF Environment and they came out, walked through with me, got the slim-jim bins for both recycling and composting for our trash rooms – we have trash rooms on every floor, which makes it easier for the tenants. And they also came with Recology and set up in our lobby and brought bins and bags for tenants, and had an education thing one evening. They gave people a comfort level that there weren’t going to be bugs crawling all over – we empty the bins in the hallways every day. And it really took off.

TOS: So in terms of logistics….to make the program work, bins were placed where tenants were already going to leave their waste. Instead of having them in the basement where they were less convenient.

Linda showed us the waste rooms and they were spacious, thanks to the slim bins – and clean – thanks to the waste being collected every day. All in all, this is an excellent set-up. And after talking to Linda, here was me thinking that this system was probably the most ideal for buildings with waste rooms.

But actually the truth is that using waste rooms in this way is not all that common or straight forward.

(Trying to reach Alexa Keilty and getting voicemail).

TOS: This is me trying to reach Alexa Keilty zero waste specialist at the department of Environment in San Francisco, who designed and implemented the multistory building food scrap collection & composting program. San Francisco has 8500 multistory buildings they work with, and their composting and recycling mandate has been in place since 2009. Just how has San Francisco navigated the waste room situation – and what do they do when a system like Linda’s doesn’t work?

ALEXA KEILTY: So when we’re setting up a building, we look at if there’s an opportunity to collect on each floor; and if they have a trash room we look at that and we do provide bins at no cost for apartment buildings to collect on each floor – as long as they have maintenance staff in the building willing to collect it. And I have set up composting on each floor in buildings and it doesn’t always work if you don’t have proper ventilation and if you don’t have maintenance staff on Saturday and Sunday – because those typically are the days that people take their trash out, on the weekends. And you don’t want to have fish that someone cooked the night before in a non-vented trash room for fourty-eight hours, because that’s going to create a real problem. And typically for the residents who live in close vicinity to the trash room – they’re the ones who complain first – so it doesn’t always work.

So when we’re setting up programs, I think that’s the main thing we look at: how do we equal the playing field? Most of the time, because of space constraints and we’re dealing with an older building stock, we’re talking about requesting the tenants to walk it down into basement areas to dispose of their recycling and composting, and then the trash chute is still there.

TOS: Trash chutes. Here we come to one of the biggest challenges for programs in multistory buildings.

I have here a 2011 report by the Recycling Council of British Colombia, that says that in Toronto city, high-rise buildings with garbage chutes had significantly lower levels of participation and higher levels of contamination than buildings without chutes. And this seems to confirm what I’ve been hearing from our guests. Chutes are convenient, and easy to use. So for a mandatory program like San Francisco, where there is pressure to increase participation – what can we do about waste chutes?

So it’s all about levelling the playing field – and here Alexa told me about a pretty interesting strategy they’re trying out to do just that…

ALEXA KEILTY: On every floor within a high rise building there’ll be a chute where people can just throw their trash, and it’s prioritising trash over all the other streams. So something to keep in mind is how can we stop prioritising trash, and how do we design and set up buildings from the get-go – and we have new ordinances requiring new construction to keep this in mind, but – when we’re talking about older buildings, how do we level the playing field?

And we also encourage property managers to close their chutes and force the tenants to walk everything down into the basement area. They usually love that idea, because chutes typically can attract pests and all it takes is somebody to put one pizza box down there and then you have a jammed chute. So, they love to close chutes, but the problem is that the tenants board in San Francisco is very strong, and some tenants may consider this a reduction in services – and if they see it as a reduction in services, then they can apply to the rent board for a rent reduction. So because of that, property managers are very fearful, they don’t want to deal with lawsuits…it’s just a very tenuous situation for them.

TOS: So that’s San Francisco’s waste chute strategy. But what about New York?

JESSICA SCHREIBER: I’m Jessica Schreiber, I work at the Department of Sanitation and the Bureau of Recycling and Sustainability. I oversee all apartment programs, so any recycling programs that have to do with high rise buildings fall under my group.

TOS: So New York’s organics recycling program is a voluntary program that has been up and running since 2013 and has been spreading through the City every since – with 148 high rise buildings involved in the program.

JESSICA SCHREIBER: Chutes are definitely our biggest issue when working with buildings – particularly some of the newer buildings in the city that have a chute room on every floor and residents are very used to just bringing everything to the chute room and separating it there. By far what we think is the best option for organics is a single collection point, usually it’s in the basement. We want everything brought one spot. For residents who aren’t used to having to go to the basement for anything, bringing a separate food stream to the basement is daunting. So we have a lot of conversations about chutes with the building management.

There are pros – if we were to make the chutes just for organics, and trash for the (hopefully) non-smelly items that can be separated on the side with the recyclables, that’s one option. There are not a lot of buildings in the city that have chosen to do that. Other cities, though, have reported that that option tends to create more of a smell and more of a maintenance issue, because this is loose food now going down the chute and getting stuck, and not always being bagged correctly. So we try to avoid chutes when we can and do a single collection area where possible. Usually that’s in the basement. There are buildings where they’ve tasked the super with collecting food scraps from a bin on each floor in the chute room – so where they have that sort of building help, that’s also possible.

TOS: So here we see more problems… It seems that avoiding chutes and focusing on a central collection point is a common strategy.

And this brought me on to talk about one of the first participants of their program – the Morningside Heights Housing Corporation. Morningside Heights is an impressive residential cooperative apartment complex comprised of 6 high-rise buildings in the borough of Manhattan – close to Columbia University. The buildings are each 21 stories high, with a total of 980 apartments. How they decided to introduce organics collection here I think is worth bringing up. They decided on a simple approach at the beginning – using a centralised system not for each building – but for the complex itself.

This had some unique benefits – not just in terms of reducing maintenance costs and equipment costs – which led to the program’s success in the building.

JESSICA SCHREIBER: Morningside Heights started as a drop-off point for the whole complex. So they have multiple buildings, and instead of every building having its own collection spot in the basement, there was a drop-off point for the whole complex. The benefit of that is that it’s convenient for the building staff, it’s convenient for us to collect becayse we’re just taking it right from that point to the curb and it’s all centralised. The other benefit of that is that when it’s a drop-off point, it makes it very easy to educate tenants about how to participate. It’s a very clear message, and it’s also a point of education, so people walking buy who aren’t aware that this is an option will see it and become more engage.

So I think it’s supportive of buildings who want to get their feet wet before they jump all the way in, and it’s also a good way to test it out. And you can see that when the bins are closed, they don’t smell because you’re getting service three times a week, so it doesn’t sit long enough to become a problem, and these solid plastic bins are not going to attract rodents. So it’s the best way to ease a building in and as residents become more used to bringing this stuff to this drop-off point, they’re going to actually want it to be in their basement because that’s even more convenient – like an added level of convenience to have it inside their own building, versus somewhere else in the complex.

TOS: So centralised systems have a lot of benefits, especially if you can overcome the tricky chute issue. And just like the waste rooms, you’ll have to make sure the area is convenient, has adequate space, is well lit and clean. And remember – no matter what system you chose, you need to factor in convenient access for the hauler as well.

LOGISTICS ROUND-UP

Now, we’ve covered quite a bit of ground in terms of logistics. Keeping in mind space constraints, how waste will be collected in the building and by the hauler, costs – so weather you can afford maintenance staff or the extra bins, convenience for tenants, odours and pests, and the problems with chutes.

In every aspect there’s a balance to be struck between convenience for the tenants, and practicality. And it can be tricky to do.

What really struck me, and what my guests have all pointed out, is that no two buildings are alike. – Like snowflakes, or like people, they have their own characteristics, challenges and personalities. And the strategy you employ will have to be completely tailored to each building’s needs.

CHAPTER 3: NEW BUILDINGS AND THE PROBLEM WITH OLDER BUILDINGS

TOS: In any given urban area, the age of the multistory buildings will factor into your organics recycling program.

What are the issues with older buildings? Well mainly that most of them have single-chute systems with tiny waste rooms – or no waste rooms at all. Putting composting on a level playing field in this situation is very hard.

Retrofitting is one solution – but an expensive one. San Francisco is encouraging people to close their chutes altogether – but there are some issues here too.

So let’s look at the bigger steps we can take. The City of Milan in Italy, for example, where the majority of people live in apartment buildings, decided to close all chutes in the city in order to level the playing field. And it’s working – chutes are closed and all organics are collected in waste rooms or central locations. We’ll get deeper into this during our Milan case study in a later episode.

Not all cities can take this approach. But they can make an impact in new buildings by requiring them to have adequate recycling facilities. Often, buildings are allowed to choose between a number of systems.

For example – Alexa mentioned the new building code in San Francisco that says all new construction has to have recycling, composting and trash on an equal playing field. So new buildings, she told me, often have decent sized waste rooms on every floor, which as a fan of waste room systems I think is great. New chute systems are an option as well – either with multiple chutes for each stream, or just one for organics. We already heard from Jessica about the possible issues with these.

Another interesting option that Alexa told me about are diverter systems for chutes – how do they hold up?

ALEXA KEILTY: So they’re now putting in diverter systems. Basically, it’s one chute with a button that you push and then there’s a baffle at the bottom of the chute which pushes the recycling, composting or trash into the right bin. The problem with those is that they never seem to work properly, or the tenants in the building haven’t been trained properly to use it, so I haven’t actually found one that’s been working well unfortunately.

TOS: “Okay so that’s a bit tricky then. I guess then the waste rooms are probably the best option at the moment”.

ALEXA KEILTY: Yeah, I think so. I mean, the problem is just labour – you have to have labour seven days a week and not all buildings have that.

CHAPTER 4: COMMITMENT OF BUILDING OWNERS & MANAGERS

TOS: Buildings are made up of people, and recycling systems are made up of people too. So successful organics recycling, then, is all about building relationships. With the tenants yes, but first of all with the building owner or manager.

In a 2014 report by the Washington State Recycling Association called Sorting It Out – The state of Multifamily Recycling in Washington State, it asked recycling professionals about the top challenges they face in program implementation. And it’s quite telling that lack of support from building managers is number three on the list of challenges, just behind space and contamination.

During our trip through California – we met with building managers…like Linda Corso…and saw just how valuable it is that they are fully on-board with the program and make it their own. But this isn’t always the case. There are factors that can influence their level of enthusiasm or commitment to the program. A building owner or manager may not know much about organics recycling – why it’s important, and whether it will cause odours and pests.

This is where education and outreach is essential.

JESSICA SCHREIBER: We do a lot of outreach, we go to a lot of building events and speak to a lot of management companies, and I always introduce organics and give a brief explination of how it works and why it’s important. When people hear that food waste is a third of our waste stream, that’s a pretty staggering statistic. So we always introduce it as part of the apartment program package. For buildings who express an interest, we will follow up enthusiastically – we’ll do a site visit and work with tenants to educate them along and bring them on board.

We do definitely encounter buildings that say “no thank you” and are not interested. They basically say “not until I have to am I even going to consider this”. I think there’s still some stigma around it – smell and rodents and stuff.

TOS: Now New York’s program is voluntary – which means they are dependent on building managers who are interested. Jessica told me that fortunately, they have their hands full with building owners who are – so they have no need to engage uninterested managers. But for a mandatory program – it’s a different story.

LILY KELLY: I’m Lily Kelly. I’m senior Program Associate for Global Green USA’s coalition for resource recovery. We’re based in Santa Monica, California and we have offices around the country in New York, New Orleans, Washington DC, and here in beautiful San Francisco.

TOS: We met with Lily Kelly of Global Green in her office during our trip last month. As part of Global Green’s goal to promote smart solutions for climate change, Lily has been exploring different solutions for organics recovery and working with cities [here you say ’systems’ instead of ‘cities, but it’s no big deal] on pilot projects in multistory residential buildings.

Lily told us how a mandatory program can affect the way building managers interact with the program…

LILY KELLY: When there’s an ordinance, or when there’s a law that requires composting, it really makes a difference and of course it does. It seems like a very obvious point to make, but just listening to the property managers changing their narrative about it from, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to compost, it seems gross and smelly” to, “How do we make this work? How do I make it not gross and smelly – by using bags or training my tenants better. How do I avoid any kind of fines for contamination – by teaching people how to do it and making signage really clear.” It really helps bring their minds to work on solving the problem, as opposed to just giving up on it and deciding it’s too hard. But then there are many other places where it’s still voluntary and that’s going to place a limit on it, if it’s more expensive.

TOS: Even though the mandatory aspect can bring more people along – there will still be hesitant building managers. And one of the biggest barriers to their commitment is a worry over cost. This is an area you will need to address for mandatory programs, but even more so for voluntary programs.

LILY KELLY: I think it is really important. In particular it shouldn’t be an extra cost for them to add a composting service. And there’s typically a transition period where they’re not going to reduce their trash service right away just because they’ve added a composting service. Down the line it may be possible, and ideally that what will happen is that there will be less trash volume so that service will go down and it’ll become less costly to the property manager. But as a safety precaution for preventing any overflow of trash, they should always try adding compost first, and then – as needed – reducing trash systems. So unless it’s mandated, getting that buy-in from them means there has to be at least a cost neutral option for them.

TOS: Now with a mandatory program, you have one more tool at your disposal: enforcement and the threat of fines. Let’s take a listen to Alexa and San Francisco’s strategy on this front…

ALEXA KEILTY: San Francisco has taken a very mild approach when it comes to enforcement. We have implemented some processing fees on buildings, so if we find over fifty percent compostables or recycling in the trash we can put a fifty percent processing charge on those accounts, and we have been doing that. That usually does get the attention of the property managers and they do eventually call and ask for assistance on how they can improve their setup and motivate their tenants.
When we approach these property managers, we don’t start talking about the law and requirements right out of the gate because people don’t well respond to that, so what we try to say is that we’re offering this service, it can greatly help your building. It will also help maintain your building so it’s cleaner, if you get people thinking about how they sort their trash properly – they typically will manage it better so we talk about that. And if they’re still resistant and don’t want to work with us, then we start talking about the law.

EPISODE END

I’m afraid we will have to leave it here for this first episode of our special on organics recycling in multi-story buildings. I hope you enjoyed our journey so far, and the new format. We’ve covered some critical challenges and key factors that come into play today – and for episode two we continue in this vein to discuss tenant participation, bin lining strategies, dealing with demographics and more.

If you have any questions or comments – you can contact us on organicstream.org website, or on twitter – our twitter handle is theorgstream.

We join Director of Recycling Bridget Anderson to discuss the DSNY’s extensive outreach and education strategy for their curbside organics collection pilot program in New York City. We explore how they dealt with the different demographics in the city, how they used online social media and traditional media, the importance of face-to-face communication, the reasons why people don’t participate, and much more.

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Breaking down the OUTREACH STRATEGY

Q: You touched on some of your strategies in the last episode, but I’d like to really understand the whole process. Can you tell me how the DSNY went about planning and implementing these strategies?

BA: Entering into a pilot program for New York City is a big challenge, because you have so many different types of communities and people with so many different experiences living in different types of housing structures. So we really approached this pilot from the perspective of what’s been successful in other cities? Most other cities have lower housing density – in New York City sixty percent of our population live in high-rise apartment buildings.

So we started focusing on the lower density areas of the city. In those low density areas, we reached out to the elected officials and the local community organisations to get feedback. Part of the strategy was to look within at sanitation and our sanitation workers know best what is happening on the ground – what neighbourhoods tend to be good recyclers already, and what neighbourhoods they think would be more amenable to doing a pilot program. Based on that, we chose a few committees; we reached out to elected officials; we talked to the local community organisations; and we tried to identify those “informal mayors” of neighbourhoods that might have their finger on the pulse of the community, to get feedback on if they think it would be successful in that neighbourhood and where the challenges might be.

Based on all of this information, we finalised our initial list of pilot areas, and then we sent a mailer to the households in the neighbourhoods about a month before the program was to start. Then we followed that up with a door-to-door door hanger that explained the program and that in a week they were to receive a brown organics bin, a kitchen container and information about the program. And then, when we do the bin deliveries – the organics bin, kitchen container and information packet – we have outreach people there during bin deliveries to talk to people on the ground; if somebody comes out and they have a question, we answer it. During those periods, we’ve encountered people who are just so excited about the program, and we’ve also encountered people who say “this really isn’t for me”. So we really try to change hearts and minds, and having people on the ground, and face-to-face communication, has been critical to getting people to even try the program.

We say that it’s a voluntary program, that you won’t get fined for not participating, but we encourage you to participate, and this is why: your going to help reduce the materials that we send to landfills that potentially could save taxpayer money, you could reduce incidences of rodents in the neighbourhood; it creates a cleaner waste stream for you, because you’re separating out the stinky stuff from the rest of your garbage. So, that on the ground, face-to-face, has been critical. It’s resource intensive, but it really has been extremely helpful to get the program off the ground in the beginning.

We also try to get articles in local newspapers – like the Daily News, New York Post, New York Times, if they’re interested – and then we have the local neighbourhood newspapers, and those have also been really helpful to explain that the scheme is coming to this neighbourhood, and that this is what it looks like, this is where you go for questions, this is our website… So they’ve been really helpful to get the message out.

Q: This strategy mirrors the strategy we lay out in Lesson 4 of our online course when we speak about outreach – that you need to let them know about the program initially around a month beforehand, and then have people going door-to-door to answer questions when the bins are delivered. And that’s exactly what you did, so it’s a very extensive campaign.

BA: Yeah, we’ve built email lists and newsletters, and any opportunity we can find the get the information to the local community, we use it.

Compost COMMUNICATION for different DEMOGRAPHICS

Q: Since there are so many different demographics in New York City, did you have different approaches that you used for the different groups of people?

BA: We had our standard approach, but in certain neighbourhoods, we had people on the ground who spoke the language. We had a Spanish speaker, a Chinese speaker, we also had a few neighbourhoods where Russian was an important language. So we had people on the ground so they’d have that specific face-to-face opportunity to speak with somebody in their own language. We also translated some of our materials – the most critical pieces of information – into multiple languages, and you can translate our website, so that’ been very useful as well.

One thing we have discovered is that, especially if you’re in an area that has a lot of retired people, we can’t rely on the web or social media as our only information portal. So, we have a hotline and utilise the city’s 311 program, and we have a lot of soft responses to the most common questions that we get. So we’re able to utilise phone calls as well as an opportunity.

Getting RESIDENTS started and using COMPOSTABLE plastic bags

Q: What were the most common questions that you got, or the most common issues that people had?

BA: We get a lot of questions like “is this mandatory, do I have to do it?” Because I think some people get the mailer and, even though it says it’s a voluntary program, they assume that because it’s a notification from the Sanitation Department, they have to participate. We encourage people by saying “it’s not mandatory, but we encourage you to try, because this is a new strategy and we’re trying to see if we can make it work in New York City”. One of the strategies that we’ve recommended to people that using certified compostable bags is one way to collect the material inside your home and get it out to the brown bin in a way that’s more similar to maybe what you used to do if you used plastic bags for garbage.

The availability of those compostable bags has been a problem. It’s taken us a while to get the bags into retail stores – there are also online outlets for the bags. The price of the bags has been a problem; some people say the bags are to expensive and they won’t use them, or that they would participate in the program if they could use the bags, but the bags are too expensive – that’s an example of something that’s been a challenge. We do say that you don’t have to use compostable bags: you can use paper bags, and you don’t even have to line your kitchen container at all if you don’t want to, it just means you have to rinse it out. And with the brown bin, you don’t have to line the bin if you have a way to rinse it out, or you can use paper bags or certified compostable bags. And this spring we’ve added that people can line their brown bin with a clear recycling bag. It’s not our preference to do this, but to encourage participation and because the compostable bags are not yet available everywhere, we are allowing people to do this to get people used to the program.

Our hope is that eventually the compostable bags will maybe become cheaper and be more available, and then we can switch out the regular plastic bags. One of the challenges with the plastic is that it doesn’t break down in the composting facility, so it adds to the contamination rate, but at this point we do think that it does encourage more participation because it’s more similar to our other recycling programs. In our recycling programs, you can use clear plastic bags, or you can put things directly in the bin, so it’s more parallel right now to those programs.

Q: So you’re thinking is that it’s more important to just get them on board and into the habit and then it’s easier to change…

BA: Right. There’s the challenge of the front end, which is participation, and then there’s the back end, which is trying to do something useful with the material. And we’re trying to balance those two things right now.

The most IMPORTANT aspects of an OUTREACH STRATEGY

Q: And in terms of strategy, would say that the face-to-face communication is the most important aspect?

BA: I don’t know if it’s the most important, but it’s a critical piece. I think getting articles in the media and generating a buzz…and we’ve been very lucky where the local television news media has picked up the program, the local neighbourhood newspapers have picked up the program; the city-wide newspapers have picked up the program and we’ve had radio shows pick up the program too. Having people hear repeatedly about the program has been absolutely critical.

Then, once an area becomes a pilot area where people are receiving the program itself, the on the ground outreach has been extremely useful. Not everybody reads the mailers: if you receive a mailing from the city, it might end up directly in your recycling bin – hopefully your recycling bin! And so, having people out there on the ground during bin deliveries to really make sure people understand the program is important. The elected officials and community boards have also often hosted meetings where people can come and ask questions.

I think what’s critical is that you try to hit every outreach opportunity that you can, because you never know who might be listening in which venue. And the bigger the program goes, the more difficult it will be, because of the more neighbourhoods we’ll have, and we’ll have to be really efficient in how we implement the process, because we won’t necessarily have an army to be in every neighbourhood all the time.

Q: And since you are planning to expand, is there anything you’re gearing up for, or planning, in terms of outreach campaigns for when the program does go city-wide?

BA: So this year, we’re working through the analysis to figure out if we are able to expand this program, and really think about it as a program that we’re going to expand city-wide – we’re working on this right now. So, we have plans to further expand in the spring to another, approximately, forty-thousand households. And this fall, we’re aggressively trying to recruit more multi-unit buildings to really understand the challenges to making this work in multi-unit buildings.

Then, next summer of 2015, we will start writing up our analysis and provide the city-wide expansion plan. In the end, when we expanded recycling, we started recycling in portions of the city and then expanded city-wide, we took a geographic strategy, where we said “now we know we’re going to go city-wide, let’s phase in each area of the city”. It is likely that that would be a useful tactic also for this type of a program once we expand it city-wide. But we haven’t yet crunched all the numbers to understand exactly how quickly it would happen and who would start first – those types of things.

The TROUBLE with high-rises

Q: Since you brought up high rises, I want to ask, what was your experience in dealing with the building owners and supers – were they on board right away, or was it hard to convince them to change?

BA: We’ve been lucky at this point because we’re recruiting buildings, and they are voluntarily saying to us that they would like to join this program. I would say one of the most interesting things to date is that it’s the co-ops and the condos – the buildings where people own their units – that tend to be much more interested in the program than the building management companies for rental buildings.

Where you have a co-op board, the co-op board president is perhaps the champion of the program, they’ve really been successful in getting buildings on board and participating, and committing to manage the program in their building. Where we have a resident of a rental building contact us, we then contact the building management company, and more often than not, the building management company says “I know this resident is interested in the program, but I don’t think I have the resources to manage it”. So we’re really working this fall to see if we can get more rental buildings on board to understand what the constraints are for a rental building as opposed to an owner building.

Residents reaction to the collection program

Q: In general now, how has the reaction been from the participants of the scheme so far, has it been mostly positive, or have there been any comments on it?

BA: It’s mixed. I would say you have the core group of residents that are really into the program; they’ve jumped on board and have given us feedback like, “I have no trash left!” and things like that. You do have, I would say, a significant set of residents who’ve chosen not to participate, and that’s the group that we’re really trying to recruit now. So we’re going back into the pilot areas and saying “you know, this really is beneficial and will make your trash management cleaner”, and things like that.

But we really have a mix. The people who participate are gung-ho about participating and enthusiastic, and then you have folks who are really choosing not to. It’s interesting when you look at the numbers; we have RFID tags attached to the brown bins, so when we go and collect, we’re able to see how many bins are placed out on each collection route and are able to get a sense of participation, which is really helpful for the pilot program. And what we’re finding is that there are some people who started in the program, and then they dropped out, or they dropped out in the winter and they came back again in the spring – and so you can see patterns there.

You also see, surprisingly, bins that had never been placed out for collection for three or four months, and then all of a sudden you see them being placed out for collection. So maybe that’s somebody who really wasn’t interested in the program and then saw their neighbours do it long enough that they said, “maybe I’ll five this a try”, or maybe they have a lot of yard waste and thought, “maybe I’ll use this for yard waste”.

So we’re trying to understand the patterns of behaviour. How do people behave with the program? Is there consistency with participation? It’s a pretty interesting analysis to understand people’s behaviour. And it’s a different thing from recycling – recycling is dry goods, so that “ick” factor doesn’t exist, whereas with organics it’s a little bit different. Yard waste is less scary than the food waste portion of course. But we have really great testimonials of people who say, “I really don’t have much garbage left, once I recycle and do the organics”.

Q: I often wonder about the people who start and drop out – what their reasons where. And it’s probably more difficult to get them back into the program again after that too.

BA: Yeah. And our feedback is that some people say “I had a free sample of compostable bags, and once those bags ran out, I tried to buy them and I couldn’t find them”, or, “they were too expensive.” So for those people, we tell them that they don’t have to use those bags, and list the other strategies we encourage them to try. There are some people then – it was a particularly tough winter last winter – and they said, “you know, I just didn’t want to do the program over the winter, but now that spring has arrived, I’m coming back.” It really is varying reasons.

Wise words of advice.

Q: And finally, do you have any advice on planning and implementing an outreach program, for those listening in who might be starting their own? Any pitfalls you want to warn against, or tips to share?

BA: If you have ideas of which communities you think you would like to start the program in, I would recommend having conversations with those local communities pretty early on. Give yourself at least a few months before the program starts to really start talking to that community, explain the “why” of the program: why are we doing this, and explaining how it would work. The more they feel a part of the development of the process, the better the response. I the very pilot area, we had a situation where certain people were told that this was going to be the pilot area before they were notified on a local level, and they felt a little bit slighted. So it was important for us, moving forward, to really get into those local communities. These are our candidate pilot areas: let’s get in there and talk to them and make sure they understand the program that’s coming. And then, when it comes, they’re not surprised. So having that up-front communication before the program starts would be an important piece.

I also think providing the tools – providing the bins and the kitchen containers – has been helpful. Giving them the tools so they didn’t have to go buy things right away was really helpful. In the initial pilot areas we had sample supplies of compostable bags so they could at least get themselves started, and that was also helpful.

In this episode we take an in depth look into the expanding organics collection and composting program in New York City. We speak with Bridget Anderson, director of the Recycling Unit of the DSNY’s Bureau of Waste Prevention, in order to understand the unique situation that a megacity faces when rolling out such a program, the logistics and strategies for setting up the scheme, challenges in dealing with different building types, managing the collected organic material, and the vision they have for the future.

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The Story So Far

Q: Can you tell me how the program got started?

BA: Organics collection was a pilot that actually started in the schools, in the 2012-2013 school year. We started on a select number of schools and focused on school cafeterias and school kitchens; and it was really an effort that was spearheaded by a number of parent-teacher organisations. They did a great job and Sanitation saw what they did and decided that we would try in on a slightly larger scale.

Then there was momentum to try this in residences also – in homes. And we’re in all five boroughs: we have pilot areas in the Bronx, in Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island – and then in Manhattan, which is a very dense area with lots of high-rise apartment buildings, we actually have selected apartment buildings that have volunteered to participate in the program. One of the challenges is to figure out how to do this in high rise buildings.

Q: How does the pilot program operate today? It is a voluntary program at the moment, correct?

BA: Yes, the pilot is voluntary. We chose the pilot areas in a combination of where, collection-wise, we thought it would work well operationally, and where there was interest among residents and among elected officials. We also looked for those low-density areas. So, it was voluntary and not everybody in the pilot areas chooses to participate, but everyone is given the opportunity.

We deliver a brown bin, which is what you set out curbside, and then in addition we deliver a kitchen container for each household, so that you have something you can use in the kitchen to collect the material. And then we provide a lot of education and outreach, and brochures…

What we do is we send a mailer to everyone in the pilot area, saying “this program is coming, this is what it is and you can expect to receive your brown bin”. Then about a week before the brown bin arrives, we do a door hanger. We go door-to-door and hang a door hanger and say “Your brown bag is arriving this week. As a reminder this is the program, it’s voluntary, we hope you participate, and this is how it works”. And then when the brown bin arrives, in that brown bin is the kitchen container and the brochure that gives details about what can and can’t be put in the bin – best practices for how to manage the material.

Q: I also saw just the other day that the Mayor of New York and his family made an ad using the brown bin…

BA: Yeah, it’s interesting, they approached us. One of the pilot areas is where the mayor’s home is – this is the mayor’s home before he moved to Gracie Mansion, which is the official Mayor home. He actually approached Sanitation and said “I would love to do a video. My daughter Chiara is very interested in this program”. And so, we developed a script for them, which they took and then tweaked, and they created the video. And the video turned out beautifully – I thought it was a great video. And now they’ve moved to Gracie Mansion, and we had the organics collection program in Gracie Mansion with Mayor Bloomberg, and now we’re continuing it with Mayor de Blasio, so we’re very excited about that.

LOGISTICS of COLLECTING organic waste in New York City

Q: I want to ask you about the expansion on the program to high-rise buildings, because as you said earlier they can be quite a challenge. How did the DSNY decide to deal with all the different types of buildings?

BA: There are other cities in the United States that already do this organics collection program – cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Toronto in Canada – and we looked at what they were doing, where they found success. Most of those cities are lower density and don’t have as many high-rise buildings. Toronto is maybe the closest to New York City in comparison to a place that already does organics collection. And we thought, let’s try this program in the lower density areas of the city – because that’s where there’s been a precedence set to have a successful program in other cities. So, we looked for parts of the city where we would focus on single family homes and small apartment buildings that are up to nine units – little town houses, brownstones, and then small apartment buildings. The pilot areas are primarily that size of building.

Then we said, if we’re going to make this a viable program, we have to tackle high-rise apartment buildings, because a significant portion of New York City’s recycling, you have to come up with an internal recycling program that then allows the building to manage the waste and get it out on the curb for Sanitation to collect. We have to do the same thing for organic material. So, we actually work with the building management and the co-op board, if it’s a co-op building, and come up with a system for how they’ll manage the organic waste inside the building to then get it out on the curb for us to collect

Q: And how many high-rises are you working with at the moment?

BA: We have over a hundred high-rises at this point.

Q: That’s quite a few. And what has been the DSNY’s strategy in dealing with the various building types? Do you have separate systems, depending on the high rise, or is there a single system that works across the board?

BA: I would say we service a different range of types of buildings – we have old, old buildings, we have brand new Leed certified buildings…a lot of it depends on the infrastructure of the building, where there’s space to put the bins. It’s very similar to recycling – where is there space to place the bins, either on each floor or in some sort of centralised area, where people can then bring their material to drop it off. And then the building staff brings it out to the curb.

So we have a few different strategies that are the most common. One is, if our large buildings tend to have chute where people will take their trash, and it foes down to the basement. In a lot of buildings there’s a little chute room where the chute exists. And if there’s space on each floor, and the building management are willing to provide the service, we recommend that both the recycling and the organics containers are put in those shoot rooms on every floor. It’s the most convenient for the residents.

That doesn’t exist in all buildings, so what’s also quite common is a centrallsed location on the first floor, possibly the basement or in the area nearby where there’s parking, where the recycling and organics bins are placed. And that’s more of a centralised area. It’s less work for the Super to service, because it’s only location – but it’s potentially a little bit less convenient for the residents because they have to go downstairs. We find with both recycling and organics collection, convenience begets participation. So if it’s easy and convenient, people will participate. The people who want to do it are going to do it no matter where you place your collection location; the people who are saying “well I’ll do it if it’s convenient.” If it’s easy for me to just throw it down the chute on my floor that to bring the organic material or recycling downstairs, then you may lose a few people in participation.

So, we have a lot of signage – signage is absolutely key to let people know on every floor where the collection location is in the building. And keeping the collection well lit, safe, secure is also key to having people comfortable with using those locations in the building.

Q: Another crucial part in organics collection programs is the collection times. How did you decide on collection times and are they different from place to place?

BA: We have a few different strategies. About fifty-thousand of the households are being offered twice a week collection, and that’s the same frequency as refuse collection. The idea is you just set out your material on collection day, but you separate the organic material from the waste and recycling. In the other half of the homes, we’re testing once a week collection. Basically, the way things work is that here you have twice a week collection of trash, once a week collection of recycling in most parts of the city, and so we’re either offering twice a week collection on the same frequency as trash collection, and the other half od the pilot, we’re offering once a week collection on recycling day. So, it’s essentially just another recycling stream to set out on your recycling day.

Q: Do you know which one is more successful, or which you’re going to pick in the long-run?

BA: We have one area of Brooklyn, where we started them in the Fall with once a week collection and switched them to twice a week collection in May, so we’re going to be studying that one. We don’t have any results yet, but we’re hopeful that that little neighbourhood – it’s called Windsor Terrace – will actually help inform us what the effect is of twice a week versus once a week.

Q: Was it difficult, in a city the size of New York, to plan collection routes and to cooperate with the haulers?

BA: So in New York City, the city actually has a municipal hauling workforce and we collect material from residences, agencies and institutions. And so, it was simply a matter of making the case to add some to add trucks in the budget to service the same routes. And we chose the pilot areas so they were co-terminus: they were the same areas as the regular routes, so there was no issue there. People were very positive about piloting the program.

Q: The ultimate goal is to make this a mandatory, city-wise curbside composting program. How are you planning to get there?

BA: The city council passed a law for us to conduct this pilot program, and the our mandate is a two-year program. And in the October of 2015, we will have to present a report to city council and say, this is how the pilot went, these are our recommendations moving forward. And so far we feel pretty positive about the participation, about people’s understanding of the program. We’re working right now to evaluate the pilot to understand what the best practices, what are the best collection frequency, what are the other aspects of the program that we’d want to take and scale up.

Scaling up city-wide is going to take quite a while. It’s not going to happen overnight; it will have to be a phase-in process. And part of it too is that what happens is if you separate the organic material and recycling fully, you don’t have as much refuse left. So, one of the big pieces is understanding how we reconfigure our routine and our truck routes so that we manage the material differently. So, maybe we don’t need as many refuse routes because there’s not as much refuse being set out as we add the organics routes.

So there’s a lot of operation pieces that we have to put into play. There’s also the aspect of geography – do we roll out district by district, which is maybe what happens. So, we’re basically in the planning process right now as we roll out the pilot, to figure out how we would do this city-wise, and I would say that it’s going to take ten years to probably get to the entire city.

Q: We tackle this whole aspect of organics collection programs in Lesson 4 of our online course on Compostory.org, so those of you listening, can go straight to the course on our site and take a deeper look at.

COMMUNITY COMPOSTING – A Critical Piece to the Puzzle

And now, I’d like to touch on the topic of community composting, because in our last episode, we were taking a look at the community composting movement in New York and we know that the DSNY has been quite involved in supporting this as well. Can you tell me a little about how you work with community composters in the city?

BA: Yes, we have a longstanding relationship – over twenty years – working with community composters. The New York City Compost Project is a group that we run and fund, and we have non-profit partners throughout the city where we provide education services – helping people to understand how to compost in your backyard, if you want to take your yard waste or your food scraps and do it yourself. We work with community gardens, and we provide finished compost from the material that they city collects and manages, and we provide tools and equipment, and technical advice for how to set up composting in community gardens.

We also work to provide drop-off programs. We have food scrap drop off programs throughout the city – we’ve about seventy in operation right now. And those drop-off programs are critical, because they get people in the mindset of “oh! this is what this is…I take my food scraps and I can bring them somewhere else and recycle it – have it be composted.” So, we see the community composters as absolutely critical to helping people understand the concepts of organic separation, what happens to it, what are the benefits to it – it’s an absolutely critical piece to the puzzle.

Q: So you agree with David Buckle, who we interviewed last week, that community composting is an essential part of creating a successful organics recycling system?

BA: Both programs are very important, yes.

Q: When speaking to David, it was clear that he had concerns about a lack of vision from policy makers in the city, that might not understand the importance of local collection and composting and wouldn’t necessarily prioritize community composting over other collection systems. What’s your take on this statement – have you seen this yourself?

BA: I actually have not seen that. We’re trying to position the city, in terms of organics waste collection, to fulfill a number of goals, and community composting plays an extremely important role in terms of introducing the community to organics and composting and the concept that you can recycle this other part of the waste stream, and to showing what actually happens to your organic waste, how it turns into compost; and creating a valuable product for the local communities.

The capacity for local, small-scale community composting is too small to handle the vast hundred and thousands of tons of material that we’re looking to divert through organics recycling. So, we as a city also have a parallel mission to find how we bring composting to scale and actually move major tonnage of material to recycling, to composting and to renewable energy. So, for us we see both as extremely important, because the local community composting creates beneficial use for the city. They have been critical to introduce the concept that this is a useful strategy but it’s not going to help us divert all of the waste. There’s so much waste in New York City, that we don’t think we’d be able to handle it through community composting. You have to have large, permitted facilities to really handle that quantity of material.

But there’s plenty of material to go around, and absolutely – this is why we fund local community composting operations – we see it as a critical piece to the pie, a piece to the puzzle.

We’re really focusing on [understanding] how we create this as a cooperative program. But it’s really tough, I mean, you have people who’ve been in the trenches for two decades working on local community composting, and I understand that maybe there’s a fear that if the city takes over this program that there won’t be a place for local community composting, and we do not at all see that as the case. They are both critical to achieving the city’s overall goal, which is diverting major tonnage of material, and creating beneficial use for local communities.

Compost Use & Compost Markets

Q: If the program is rolled out city-wide, you will have a lot of compost on your hands. What are you planning to do with the compost and what are you currently doing with it?

BA: We take the material from the pilot to local and regional compost facilities. With the material that’s taken to the regional facilities, we don’t actually take back the compost at this point. There may be a situation moving forward where we develop a relationship where we would have a certain percentage of the compost come back. With the material that’s processed locally, we turn it into compost and use it in street trees, we use it in parks, we use it in gardens. We have give-back programs for non-profits, schools and community groups, to use the compost for their greening projects. We also create a mulch product in addition to compost. And most of the material that we’re currently compost locally is yard waste, and that creates a beautiful mulch product as well as the compost. We also sell the compost to landscapers, so we do have a small revenue stream there.

Q: Are you involved in creating markets for compost, or encouraging market growth for compost?

BA: For the material we compost locally, we’ve worked on this landscaper market, and it’s really a bulk purchase type of situation. We have not gotten into the business of creating a retail market for the material – it just hasn’t been necessary to date, because we’re handling and selling all the material with the landscapers and with our give-back programs. With the regional composting facilities that are taking the material during the pilot period, we have not been involved in how they’re marketing the material, although we are evaluating with them the quality of the material we’re giving them, and the quality of the material that comes out, so we understand better what it is we can create from the material that would come out of a New York City stream.

Q: What is the quality like, and what contamination rate are you experiencing?

BA: The quality is quite good. In the residential program, our contamination rate is very, very low. It’s well below five percent. So we feel very good about that. It is a voluntary program, so the people who participate want to participate and try to do it right. That may change obviously when you make it mandatory.

Q: Is creating a market for compost something you’re looking at doing in the future?

BA: It would definitely be part of our larger plan. We want to ensure that the material is going to beneficial use – and is not just composting; we’re also looking into anaerobic digestion so we can create energy from the material. But creating a viable program, if there’s a way to generate revenue from it, that’s obviously a huge benefit, so it’s definitely something we’ll be looking into.

Q: Yes indeed, and we just released a new lesson – Lesson 5 – of our course were we take a detailed look at market creation for compost as well. And in terms of your aims or objectives with the organic material – as you said, diverting materials from landfill and supporting communities are on your list. But what about the organic material itself and what it’s used for? Are you focused solely on creating revenue streams, with waste-to-energy for example, or are you more concerned with creating quality compost to help replenish the soil?

BA: One of our biggest objectives is to find ways to reduce the material going to landfill, and the parallel objective is to create beneficial use. And obviously as a city we are concerned about being cost-effective in what we do, so any opportunities we have to market material and gain revenue streams is important. We are focused primarily at this point on the composting, because that’s a proven technology; we know there are existing facilities, we know that a useful product can be created and marketed.

Anaerobic digestion is a little bit newer of a technology for us in the North-East. There are wastewater treatment plants that have been using anaerobic digestion for a long time, and the question is: how viable is it to utilise AD for a municipal organics program? What we’ve learned is that the challenges are when you co-mingle food waste and yard waste, and food soiled paper, that can cause problems with anaerobic digestion, and so we’re trying to figure out if those energy conversion technologies (such as anaerobic digestion), could be viable with our waste stream. We won’t be able to collect yard waste separately from food waste, we really need the efficiency of collection to collect it all together , and so the question is: is there an option to utilise anaerobic digestion with that type of material streams.

On the commercial side, with businesses, we expect it’ll be food waste. So we think that there’s quite a good opportunity there for turning food into renewable energy through anaerobic digestion. But on the residential side, we think it may be more difficult.

Q: So you’re going to stick with composting, which is probably the most ideal option on many fronts.

BA: Yes. The challenges there of course is that you need a lot of space for composting – there are siting issues. For New York City, siting any new facility is expensive and difficult. There’s permitting processes, and because we’re right the confluence of three different states, each state has their own permitting requirements and procedures.

Closing the Loop

Q: And for our listeners who are rolling out similar programs, we strongly recommend fully integrating the multiple benefits of compost use in the program vision. Keeping organics out of a landfill and managing the waste streams is important – and it’s usually the main argument to be had in large cities – but then programs need to take into account all the benefits of compost use as well when developing operations. We’re finding out that many programs need to put more focus on end-product quality. So there’s a whole ecosystem involved here and it goes beyond just the ‘waste management’ side of things, so it’s very important to include that in the program vision.

And so Bridget, in terms of closing the loop as much as possible do you travel far to the composting sites you use, or?

BA: We have one composting facility on Staten Island, and that’s a great system. So, all the material that we collect on Staten Island, stays on Staten Island, so that’s a very closed-loop and successful system. For the other material that we have, everything is within a hundred miles of the city, but we do have to truck it outside the city. And so, we basically say it’s regional capacity. And we’re hopeful that once we position ourselves to go to scale, that we will be able to work with companies who will local themselves closer to New York City.

Organic Waste COLLECTION in A MEGACITY: Successes and Advice

Q: The project has been a great success so far and it’ll be exciting to see how it progresses, but already you’ve gained a lot of experience and tackled a host of issues. I’d love to know more about the pitfalls and successes you’ve experienced on your journey so far. How has it been?

BA: Yeah, so one of the best things that has happened is that we found these local resident champions of the program, and they are the best sales people. Having peer-to-peer interactions where people are explaining to their neighbours how great the program is, how little trash they have left, and how easy it is, has been incredibly helpful. And we found that it takes a lot of work, but the in-person interactions that we have as a program with the residents is really the most effective way to get people who may be a little bit shy, nervous or intimidated on board.

We get a lot of questions and concerns about rodents and pests, and they say it’ll be more work. Well, we say it’s the same amount of waste that you’re throwing out now, you’re just putting it in a separate bin. And the bin that we have has a lid and a latch, and so we’re able to explain to people that it actually reduces the potential for pest issues because you’re containing that waste. Right now New York City has primarily a bag program, so material is placed out at the curb in bags, and when you have a plastic bag, it’s much easier for a rat to chomp into the back and access the food. If the food is in a container, it’s much more difficult for them to access that meal. So we’re working with the Department of Health to study how the rodent populations are affected by the program.

We’ve also had some people say there’s been fruit flies and maggots, and those sorts of things. And it’s amazing because we use social media a lot in the program, and we often have residents providing best practices and tips to the people who have concerns about fruit flies and maggots before we even get to them. So, we have a list of best practices and tips, but we really do rely also on that peer-to-peer education.

Q: And finally, for our audience who might be wondering how to start a similar program in other large cities around the world, what advice would you give for rolling out a system like this in a large city?

BA: I would say that you need to have a plan for where you’re going to take the material. Don’t set up the front-end without the back-end in place – that’s critical. I would say the best way to roll-out the program is to do it so it follows the existing collection schedules and the existing behaviour patterns of people – so we said “add this to the recycling bay, they’re already setting out recycling” or “have them set it out on the same days as trash”. That way the behaviour is sort of the same, it’s just that you’re separating out the material.

The stakeholder engagement has been critical, so speaking with the elected officials and getting them on board – they can be your best advocates in their districts. We found that not only the elected officials, but the local civic organisations have been critical. You have these informal mayors of neighbourhoods that really understand the neighbourhood and understand what messaging will work in that neighbourhood; is this a neighbourhood that will respond better to the fact that we’re trying to save taxpayer money? Is this a neighbourhood that will respond better to the environmental message? That’s been critical for us to target our education and our messaging.

In this episode, of our now bi-weekly podcast show, we focus on urban community composting in New York City and speak to long-time community composter David Buckel from Added Value Red Hook Community Farm in Brooklyn to learn more about the movement and to discuss the importance of supporting urban community composting schemes to achieve true sustainability. We will explore the ways community composting can demonstrate a closed-loop cycle and educate the public about soil health and sustainability, how community composting fits into a larger organics recycling system and is an integral part of that system, the challenges NYC composting face and the opportunities on the horizon.

As a leader in organic waste recycling, ORBIS has a wide range of plastic curbside organic recycling bins and carts to chose from to help you improve recycling rates, conserve natural resources and help the environment. With value-added educational programming, community outreach and environmental expertise, ORBIS helps communities meet their organic waste diversion goals while improving the health of the planet. For more, visit their website.

Where COMMUNITY COMPOSTING is today

Q: The community composting movement is growing strong in New York at the moment. The DSNY, for example, who started their NYC Compost Project in 1993 to support local composting programs, now support over 200 composting sites and 8 to 10 mid-size operations in the five boroughs, and the collection points for dropping off food scraps at greenmarkets are growing in number: over half of the greenmarket farmer’s markets are outfitted with a drop-off program.

As a long-time community composter currently working at Added Value Redhook Community Farm in Brooklyn, you’re right there on the ground watching all this happening. Can you give me a brief picture of what community composting looks like today?

DB: Quite a bit of it depends upon how you define community composting. There’s an awful lot of things going on in terms of community composting in the city; there’s quite a bit going on in terms of closing the loop, and a lot of that is in the community gardens around the city. Folks will bring their kitchen scraps to their community garden, where they get composted in small systems. What there’s less of is community composting that is defined not only as trying to close the loop as much as possible on organic material, but also engaging the public as much as possible, so that we can promote environmental stewardship.

Q: Community composting has had a long history in New York, hasn’t it?

DB: Community composting has been, to a degree, fairly strong in New York, because of the presence of community gardens around the city; New York City is unusual in having hundreds of community gardens. What’s new for community composting is adding in the public engagement, and trying to make sure that capacity grows more. The community gardens can take organic material to a degree, but at some point it’s just too much for them because their systems are usually quite small. So we’re trying to develop more sites that have bigger capacity and can take more organics.

New York Policy Makers Lack Strong VISION For COMMUNITY COMPOSTING

Q: In terms of a vision for community composting, many (including yourself) are in favour of small-scale, decentralised models that prioritise closing the loop, can you tell me what policy makers have in mind for community composting in the city?

DB: We haven’t yet seen a strong vision articulated by policy makers for the future of community composting. What I have experienced is more helping what already is happening. So, assistance for community gardens and things like that. The Department of Sanitation has been very helpful in terms of developing slightly larger sites that can take more material, but I haven’t seen a vision that essentially articulates where we want to be in the future twenty years from now.

Q: Why do you think that is? We know how challenging it is for them to coordinate all of the different aspects in such a large city, as well as rolling out such a large collection program.

DB: Perhaps they haven’t been challenged enough to realise that this is the sort of thing we will have to confront sooner or later, because, to me, there’s no way to get around the future in terms of closing the loop on the travel of organics. We will, sooner or later, have to find ways to make sure organics are not travelling large distances in order to be processed. We think that’s the kind of vision that has to be articulated at the policy level. And then, everything else comes along with it: even if we optimise community based composting as much as we can, because our cities in the US are so badly designed, there’s no question that we will also need curbside pickup as a municipal function; we’ll also need commercial composting. We’ll need all of those things.

What we’re not seeing is a vision that’s big enough and future-thinking enough to say that we have to optimise community based composting first and foremost, and then pull in all these other elements to best address the organics.

Community Composting In Practice

Q: Before we tackle the bigger issues, can you tell us more about how things work today with community composting: how are the organics are collected & processed?

DB: One of the most exciting things going on in New York City in terms of organics being collected is the farmer’s market collection program. It’s run by a group called Grow NYC, which has several green farmer’s markets around the city, and they have tables where folks can bring their food scraps from home, drop off their food scraps and then buy their food to take home, where they will make food scraps that then go back to the farmer’s market the next week. So it’s a wonderful, local cycle for the organics stream.

The food scraps are distributed to different sites around the city, within the city limits, one of which is where I’ve spent a lot of my time called the Red Hook Community Farm in Brooklyn, New York. And so we will be getting that material from farmers markets in the borough of Brooklyn, closer by. We also maintain tumblers so that community residents who can’t compost at home can walk their food scraps over and put them in the tumblers, and that material will wind up in our larger system over time.

Q: Do you see a lot of people participating in this, or is it gaining in popularity?

DB: It’s growing more and more popular as people hear about it. They’ve just passed the three million pound mark in terms of the collections they have done, so it’s to be quite big of a scale, and they seem to be adding new farmer’s markets every year. So that’s very exciting. Another exciting development is that the Department of Sanitation has begun to support the development of urban farms, and you’ll see a very similar type of magic happening, because at the urban farms they will often have farm stands where they sell locally grown, fresh produce right next to the fields where the produce is grown. So folks, when they come, will bring their food scraps. And this is what happens in Red Hook, Brooklyn, because folks will come and bring their food scraps, drop them off in our tumblers, and then buy some produce at the farm stand and go back home and create a very nice local circle – a closed loop for the organics.

Q: And how is the organic material typically collected from the farmer’s markets and urban gardens?

DB: Well at Added Value’s Red Hook Community Farm, the material is brought to us. So, local residents will walk it or bicycle the material from their homes. And then we get some of the scraps from the Grow NYC farmer’s markets, which is brought to us in plastic bins by a truck. The big difference is that it’s just travelling within Brooklyn, as opposed to having trucks drive on highways and downs streets. We have a smaller truck, as opposed to the bigger trucks that get loaded up and then have to drive outside the city for a distance to transport the material.

Q: One issue we often talk about with organics collection is the contamination rate, and the quality of the organics collected in New York has been described as pristine. Would you agree with that description? What has been your experience?

DB: Well I can’t speak for the city, but what I see happening is that, in terms of the material collected at the farmer’s markets, we’ve very, very clean material that’s being dropped off – in particular because the folks who go to the trouble of collecting their food scraps and bring them to the community sites once a week are very conscientious, and so our level of contaminants are extremely low.

Curbside Organic COLLECTION And COMMUNITY COMPOSTING – Can They Work Together?

Q: With the DSNY managing an ever expanding residential curbside collection scheme for NYC, can community composting be an integral part of the system, or are they at odds with one another?

DB: In my view they are in direct conflict and at great odds in some ways, and it depends upon the vision that is articulated for policy in a city. For example, when I started this work, I talked to some folks in Toronto, who were very active in trying to promote sustainability in regard to how organics were treated in the city. And they had a choice – they had to either support community composting and invest in it as much as possible, or invest their time in trying to develop curbside pickup. They chose curbside pick up, because they felt it could be a bridge to community composting, and they told me that the exact opposite happened.

Because they had never developed a culture of people trying to keep their organics as local as possible, once the curbside started, it was very challenging to get to that culture, because people could just put things on the curb, and they got into the habit of that. So now what they’re looking at is a much longer time-frame for persuading the public that it would be better for their organics to stay much closer to home because it’s more environmentally sustainable.

So in that way, Toronto shows that curbside municipal pickup and community composting can be at odds and in conflict, if there’s no vision of policy that says we need to be developing community composting as much as we possibly can, while at the same time we recognise that not everything can come to community based composting sites – we do also need curbside municipal pickup. But you see, that kind of vision doesn’t see them at odds. That kind of vision says: let’s do what’s most environmentally first, and develop community composting as much as we can, and then recognise we also have to do curbside municipal pickup, as well as commercial composting. That’s different from what happened in Toronto where it seems it was posed as a choice, one or the other, and now my colleagues up there are saying it will take them so much longer to ever develop community based composting.

Q: That is something to bear in mind when developing policy. Now let’s move on and talk about the benefits of community composting. I’m sure you agree with me in saying that community composting schemes can really make an impact in educating people on organics recycling and the importance of keeping the stream clean?

DB: That’s true. One benefit is that unlike glass or plastic, or metal, it’s much easier for the public to participate in the process when it comes to processing the organics. They can’t as likely do that with glass, metal or paper, but with community composting, they can go very close to their home, contribute to the compost process, and – if it’s a type of a site that places a value on community participation – volunteer in making the compost with their own hands.

That has several benefits. One is that if the material is used in their community, they get much more invested in it, because they see that it’s going to be used for a local urban farm, or for street trees, or a food garden their local public school where kids attend. So there’s a much stronger connection to it, and more dedication and commitment.

But they also just care more about it in general. So one effect, if it’s optimised, is that people will care more about what they’re putting out on the curb as well. So, they may take some to community sites, but if they’re putting some on the curb for pickup, they know the importance of not having contaminants if they’re participated at a community compost site, so they’ll be more careful that way.

Q: On the note of education – how do you draw people in and get them interested?

DB: I’ve never found it hard. On the site at Red Hook Community Farm, as long as you post hours that are consistent – we put hours up on our website so people can check to see when they can volunteer – and we get in touch with the different volunteer groups to let them know what the opportunity is. Very quickly things take off, and the question is not so much, “how do we get people here?, it’s more about “oh, is that too many people?”, or “how do we best manage this so everyone can have a meaningful experience, given how many people are here?”

Q: That’s a great problem to have.

DB: It is, it’s a wonderful problem. But it just further demonstrates the importance of community composting – that there’s a hunger on the part of so many to participate in this type of work.

Job Creation In Small-Scale COMPOSTING Projects

Q: For those out there that might not be convinced of the importance of community composting yet – can you tell us some more benefits you’ve seen?

DB: At the top of the list, it’s better for the environment. It reduces environmentally costly transport by so many trucks on the streets. It better supports local food growing, and it also supports other green projects in communities. So, if folks want to green up their community with more street trees or flower gardens, or food gardens, there’s more compost available locally to do that.

And then here in New York City, after the last hurricane we had, which was so devastating, by building up our urban soils and improving storm water management through community composting, we make ourselves more resilient in the face of climate change. The last hurricane, Hurricane Sandy that came through New York and so devastated us, made that all the more important.

And lastly, over time, if we can develop community composting sufficiently, according to the broad vision of what’s the most sustainable way to live, it will generate jobs. We’re not there yet, but we’re trying – I’m actually running a job training program out at the Red Hook Community Farm, and the movement has to get much bigger in order to start generating jobs.

Q: We’re very interested in creating self-sustaining models that benefit the economy and society as a whole – and this is an area that composting and recycling initiatives have a lot of potential. So apart from growing the community composting movement and the sites themselves, what are your main problems or focuses right now in creating jobs?

DB: One important development we need now – and we’re so ready for this – is the generation of revenue models. I can’t help but say that if community composting is going to be successful, we need some kind of funding stream. The ones that have been developed commercial enterprises don’t work, because the goals are a little different. But on the other hand, community composting can’t be just a none profit endeavour, because you would wind up chasing grants all the time.

And if one sign of success is that there are more composting sites, the problem you have is that the foundation pie (i.e. grants), gets smaller and smaller. So, much like with urban agriculture (at least in the US), the answer has to be to get a little more business-like and pay more attention to generating revenue, so that even when we continue to turn to foundations for grants, we also have some generation of revenue to develop financially sustainable models of operation.

Q: In relation to this, what is the market like for compost at the moment in New York – is it strong?

DB: It is. Before the hurricane we were able to meet the farm’s needs and start to explore some markets, and we found that many buyers are willing to pay a premium – to pay more than they otherwise would because they knew it was locally made compost and they wanted to support that movement. So there was this great, untapped market of people who wanted to support the local economy and keeping things as environmentally sustainable as possible.

Challenges to Overcome: NEGATIVITY and RESTRICTING Laws

Q: New York is a very densely populated area, which I’m sure brings its own unique challenges to community composting. What challenges have you faced in the city?

DB: One is the lack of the broadest vision of where community composting across five, ten, and then ultimately twenty-five, when we want it to be what it should be. So, as a result of that, people too superficially discount community composting with observations like “well, there’s just not enough land”, or, “Well, we can’t divert all of our organics to community composting, so we have to do municipal curbside pickup.

The other thing is existing laws. Not that there was any bad intention in the creation of these laws. In fact, in New York City, some of the most applicable laws were intended to address the problem of organised crime being involved in the hauling industry. And that’s an important mission, but the unintended side-effect was that the laws impede the growth of community composting – particularly with regard to commercial organics. The current law does not allow those organics to flow unimpeded to community based compost sites.

It’s been very discouraging because there are so many young people, in particular, who are very excited to be environmental stewards and to develop bicycle carting businesses, and things of that sort, and they’re deterred from the outset. And quite often they give up and turn to other environmental work. Hopefully we don’t lose them altogether, in terms of environmental work, but it’s sad that their passions get deterred at the outset.

Q: That is very sad. But there is a petition started now to change the laws?

DB: There is a petition now. Some folks are trying to get food businesses in the city to ask the city legislators to change these laws. The hope is that it will gain some force. But the problem is that there’s a lot of discouragement, because it doesn’t seem like the policy makers are “there”, and without that kind of support it can be overwhelming.

Q: Hopefully it will work out eventually…

DB: Oh, I think it will. Things are gradually changing. One of the big problems we have had is folks who are able to stick with it and keep trying often look for ways to educate themselves about how to be community composters. And unfortunately, up until now, in the compost industry all the educational materials are geared towards commercial folks. The downside of this is that a lot of people who do community composting will go to these trainings, and they’ll come back thinking that the answer to their problems is machines. So [they think] the way we can get more done is if we have a bucket loader, or we have a grinder. They start thinking the way a large commercial facility would think.

And I can tell you from personal experience that once machines show up at a site, the people disappear. That’s a big problem when folks start reaching for machines, because then the other goal – to engage the public and get them involved – starts to disappear because the machines are there to do the work and the people see themselves as less relevant, and less important.

But we’re just now starting to get some videos out, and some more information out, that is actually for community composters. Instead of coming from the compost industry, which really doesn’t think about community composters, it’s actually coming from community composters themselves. So there’s more material for other community composters to work with, so that they can keep their focus on people and on community.

Wise Words Of Advice.

Q: For the final question – what advice can you give our listeners who might be starting their own community composting sites where they live?

DB: Yeah, I think I’d say a number of things. One is that it’s important to find the people who are more interested in action than talking – people who’re not afraid to do work with shovels and pitchforks. I think the danger sign would be that instead, people want to talk about doing a bunch of fliers, making a website, developing stickers, and planning out how to get to thirty different restaurants, or fifty different households.

One story I can tell you is that I had a couple of individuals who were very excited about doing this, and that’s the road they went down. They started making all these big, huge plans that were taking months and months of planning. And I said, “Well, why don’t you try doing a pickup from just one restaurant, and getting that process. Just try that for me to see if you can do that, because if you know you can’t do that, then you shouldn’t be making all these plans”. And it turned out they couldn’t do it.

So, for folks who are interested, that’s a good test. And that leads to my second piece of advice, which is to start small. Many people feel like they have to have it all planned out and go big, whereas if you just start with one or two restaurants, or maybe a dozen households – see if you can do that first, and control odours and rats. And if you can, that’s fantastic and you can build up and get bigger. But don’t spend all this time making big plans, when really you’re not able to pull off the practicalities of it all yet.

And then the last thing I would say is to be guided by a strong vision for what you want to achieve, because so many people will tell you all the different obstacles in the way. Like, “There’s not enough land”, you know, “You can’t have odours, you can’t have rats”. When, if there’s a strong vision which says community composting will be what we have to do in the future, because it’s environmentally the most sustainable and keeps the organics as close as possible in the loop…if you just remember that vision when people say all the negative things, you can say “Well, I know that might mean it takes us longer, but we know we’re going to get there”. And then they can keep up their good spirits. They’re on the right side of history!